I’m kinda a newbie to linux (…going on 20 years now, slow learner). I recently came across tldr and don’t know how I lived without it, because man pages can be a little much for a non technical person.
Is there a helpfile / command to learn the purpose of the current root directory you are in? I’ve been reading a few books on Linux at the library, and everything about it kinda fascinates me, and I can’t stop asking questions trying to learn about it…
My current question is what is /etc/skel/ . It’s an empty directory and it has some purpose. Is there a tool to query what the purpose of this directory is? Like whatis . or something like that, for educational purposes; rather than having to web search/“google” it everytime.
For more context, those UNIX would run on machines that were the size of a large room, if not an entire floor.
And you’d input and get output on a TeleTYpewriter. The video terminals came later. Sometimes you’d dial into them over 300 baud modem. Even just
ls /could take a significant amount of time to output if the names were super long, let alone the paper and ink ribbon consumption. And you’d be lucky to even have 80 column output, you’d often have 40 or even less.DOS came two decades later and still had that 8.3 format because you’d use 5¼ floppies with 320k of space.