When dealing with a terminal input when trying to accomplish anything, you can use a plethora of terminal commands. But most of the time you will only use the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full potential of the command. Lucky for Unix based file systems, like the one we use everyday when you fire up your Mac, have a built-in manual for every command and the syntax of how it is used.
Example:
For this example we will use the man command on the ifconfig command
man ifconfig
and your result will look something like this-
IFCONFIG BSD System Manager’s Manual IFCONFIG
NAME
ifconfig — configure network interface parameters
SYNOPSIS
ifconfig [-L] [-m] [-r] interface [create] [address_family] [address
[dest_address]] [parameters]
ifconfig interface destroy
ifconfig -a [-L] [-d] [-m] [-r] [-u] [-v] [address_family]
ifconfig -l [-d] [-u] [address_family]
ifconfig [-L] [-d] [-m] [-r] [-u] [-v] [-C]
ifconfig interface vlan vlan-tag vlandev iface
ifconfig interface -vlandev iface
ifconfig interface bonddev iface
ifconfig interface -bonddev iface
ifconfig interface bondmode lacp | static
DESCRIPTION
The ifconfig utility is used to assign an address to a network interface
and/or configure network interface parameters.
Now as you can see from the results, the man command gives helpful info and descriptions for any command in the Unix library. It isn’t a lot, but it’s a good place to start!