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When navigating through Linux man pages, sometimes you need to query the meaning of flags like -p or -al in the man pages.
The default text reader for man pages is less and I'm trying to use the / search to find the first occurrence from the commons flag list definitions using:
/^-p
But Pattern not found happen and not works.
This trick works when working in vim, but not applicable in less when reading the man pages.
Is there a way to accomplish this requirement?
/^-p means there are no characters before -p. But if you look at the man pages, you will see there are some blank characters preceding these flags.
The search pattern should be /^\s+-p
where:
^ matches the beginning of the line\s+ matches one or more occurrences of whitespace charactersEdit: While the search pattern above is ideal, it is not very practical when searching. An easy way to find such sections in man pages is to use / -p. Slash, followed by 2 spaces and the option your are searching for.
