Here are some useful sources of help.
      Text stands for something of your
      choice that you type in—usually a command or
      filename.
apropos
	    textEverything containing string
	    text in the whatis
	    database.
man
	    textThe manual page for text.  The
	    major source of documentation for UNIX® systems.
	    man ls will tell
	    you all the ways to use the ls command.
	    Press Enter to move through text,
	    Ctrl+B
	    to go back a page,
	    Ctrl+F
	    to go forward, q or
	    Ctrl+C
	    to quit.
which
	    textTells you where in the user's path the command
	    text is found.
locate
	    textAll the paths where the string
	    text is found.
whatis
	    textTells you what the command
	    text does and its manual page.
	    Typing whatis * will tell you about all
	    the binaries in the current directory.
whereis
	    textFinds the file text, giving
	    its full path.
You might want to try using whatis on
      some common useful commands like cat,
      more, grep,
      mv, find,
      tar, chmod,
      chown, date, and
      script.  more lets you
      read a page at a time as it does in DOS, e.g., ls -l |
	more or more
	.  The
      filename* works as a wildcard—e.g., ls
	w* will show you files beginning with
      w.
Are some of these not working very well?  Both
      locate(1) and whatis(1) depend
      on a database that is rebuilt weekly.  If your machine is not
      going to be left on over the weekend (and running FreeBSD), you
      might want to run the commands for daily, weekly, and monthly
      maintenance now and then.  Run them as root and, for now, give each one
      time to finish before you start the next one.
#periodic dailyoutput omitted#periodic weeklyoutput omitted#periodic monthlyoutput omitted
If you get tired of waiting, press
      Alt+F2 to
      get another virtual console, and log in
      again.  After all, it is a multi-user, multi-tasking system.
      Nevertheless these commands will probably flash messages on your
      screen while they are running; you can type
      clear at the prompt to clear the screen.
      Once they have run, you might want to look at
      /var/mail/root and
      /var/log/messages.
Running such commands is part of system
      administration—and as a single user of a UNIX® system,
      you are your own system administrator.  Virtually everything you
      need to be root to do is system administration.  Such
      responsibilities are not covered very well even in those big fat
      books on UNIX®, which seem to devote a lot of space to pulling
      down menus in windows managers.  You might want to get one of
      the two leading books on systems administration, either Evi
      Nemeth et.al.'s UNIX System Administration
      Handbook (Prentice-Hall, 1995, ISBN
      0-13-15051-7)—the second edition with the red cover; or
      Æleen Frisch's Essential System
      Administration (O'Reilly & Associates, 2002,
      ISBN 0-596-00343-9).  I used Nemeth.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
    documentation may be
    sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
    Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.