Eskimo North

I have installed SUSE Linux with my windows XP.
It came with six GB of software that works well using the icons just like windows.
To run programs from a terminal window you must type the program name and linux command.
The commands I have printed out but wish I had a list of all the program names with a brief discription.

Thanks

Unfortunately I know of no such comprehensive list. But if you are looking for a program that does something, apropos is a useful command to find it:

$ apropos word

This will return entries for every manual page that contains that word. You can then do:

$ man item

For clarity, I made the command prompt green and what you typed blue. '$' is the standard bourne shell non-root command prompt although you can change it to anything you like by setting the environmental variable $PS1.

You can do an 'ls' on various execution directories, /bin /usr/bin /sbin /usr/sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin and whereever else you might have executables and then use the 'man' command to find out how to invoke them and what they do.

An extended possibility since apropos is basically a database grep:

apropos * | egrep "\((1|6|8)" | sort > command_list

This would give a one-line description for everything found in the whatis database (apropos *) and only print the executables (by listed man numerical section; 1=user commands, 6=games, 8=system admin commands). Since sometimes entries are in subsections—"(1)", "(1V)" and similar—this will search for things like "(1", "(8", etc.

It'll sort it (apropos is unsorted and long lists can seem jumbled) and pump it out to the named file.

This also assumes that distributors and man-page writers set their man pages to the right sections. ^_^'