Unlock the Full Potential of Your Help Command with These Mind-Blowing Examples, Options, and Switches - You Won’t Believe What You’ve Been Missing!

Have you ever used the help command on your computer or device? If so, you might assume that this feature is limited to providing basic information about the commands and programs you’re using. However, the help command can actually offer a wealth of useful information and shortcuts that can save you time, streamline your workflow, and maximize your productivity.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the most powerful and surprising ways to use the help command, including advanced examples, options, and switches that you might not have even known existed. Once you unlock the full potential of this underrated tool, you won’t believe what you’ve been missing!

Getting Started

Before we dive into the more advanced features of the help command, let’s review the basics. To access the help command, you’ll typically need to open a command prompt or terminal on your device. Then type “help” followed by the name of the command or program you want information about. For example, if you want help with the “ls” command in Linux or macOS, you could type “help ls” or “man ls” (which is short for “manual page”).

When you use the help command, you’ll typically see a brief description of the command, along with a list of available options or arguments. However, there are many more hidden features and shortcuts you might not know about. Let’s explore some of the most powerful examples, options, and switches you can use to supercharge your command-line experience.

Mind-Blowing Examples

Here are some advanced examples of how you can use the help command to improve your productivity and efficiency:

1. Get quick help with a single option

If you already know the option or argument you want to use with a particular command, you don’t need to read the entire help documentation. Instead, you can use the “-h” (or “–help”) option to get a brief description of that option. For example, if you’re using the “git” command and you want to know more about the “clone” option, you could type “git clone –help” to see a short description of the available options.

2. See all available options at once

By default, the help command only shows a brief overview of the available options or arguments for a particular command. If you want to see all the available options at once, you can use the “-a” (or “–all”) option. This will display a more detailed listing, along with examples and descriptions of each option. For example, if you want to learn more about the “ssh” command on Linux, you could type “man ssh -a” to see all the available options and their descriptions.

3. Search for specific keywords

If you’re dealing with a particularly complex or large command, the help documentation can be overwhelming. However, you can use the “/” command to search for specific keywords or phrases within the documentation. For example, if you’re using the “grep” command in Linux and you want to search for examples related to the “-i” option (which ignores case sensitivity), you could type “man grep /-i” to see all the relevant information.

Options and Switches

In addition to these examples, there are also many powerful options and switches you can use with the help command to customize your experience even further. Here are a few of the most useful:

-M/–manpath

This option allows you to choose which directories are searched for manual pages. By default, the help command looks in the directories specified by the “MANPATH” environment variable (if set), and in a few other common directories. However, if you want to customize this behavior, you can use the “-M” (or “–manpath”) option followed by a comma-separated list of directories.

-P/–pager

This option allows you to choose which pager or viewer is used to display the help documentation. By default, most systems use the “less” command as the pager. However, if you prefer a different pager (such as “more”, “cat”, or a graphical viewer), you can use the “-P” (or “–pager”) option followed by the name of the desired pager.

-S/–sections

This option allows you to specify which sections of the manual pages to search. For example, if you only want to see information from the “1” section (which contains basic commands), you could use the “-S 1” (or “–sections=1”) option. Conversely, if you want to see only the sections related to system administration, you could use the “-S 8” (or “–sections=8”) option.

Conclusion

As you can see, the help command isn’t just a basic feature that provides a minimal description of your commands and programs. Instead, it’s a powerful tool that can save you time, streamline your workflow, and maximize your productivity. By using the advanced examples, options, and switches we’ve discussed in this article, you can unlock the full potential of the help command and take your command-line skills to the next level. Who knows what other hidden gems you might discover along the way?

The help command is a Command Prompt command that’s used to provide more information on another command.

You can use the help command at any time to learn more about a command’s usage and syntax, like which options are available and how to actually structure the command to use its various options.

Help Command Availability

The help command is available from within the Command Prompt in all Windows operating systems, including Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and others.

The help command is also a DOS command available in MS-DOS.

The availability of certain help command switches and other help command syntax may differ from operating system to operating system.

Help Command Syntax

help [command] [/?]

Learn how to read command syntax in Windows if you need help understanding the syntax as it’s written above or displayed in the table below.

Help Command Examples

help ver

In this example, the full help information for the ver command is displayed on the screen, which might look something like this: Displays the Windows version.

You can save the output of the help command to a file using a redirection operator with the command. 

help robocopy

Just as in the previous example, the syntax and other information on how to use the robocopy command are displayed. However, unlike the ver command, robocopy has lots of options and information, so the command prompt displays a lot more information than just one sentence like you might see with some commands like ver.

Due to the nature of the help command, it’s used with just about every other command in existence, like rd, print, xcopy, wmic, schtasks, path, pause, more, move, label, prompt, diskpart, color, chkdsk, attrib, assoc, echo, goto, format, and cls.

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