In this movie I want to talk about the help command inside Git.
And the way that you invoke it is just to type git, which is how we preface
all of our commands that are going to go through Git, followed by a space, and
then help, so that's the command, so we have git, we are telling Git execute the command help.
This is the most basic command there it is because what git help does is it
returns a page that will help us out about using Git.
So here's how to use Git, here is the different things that we can use after it,
and here's the most commonly-used Git commands with an explanation of each of
them, and if you scroll to the bottom, you will see git help followed by the
command will give us more information on a specific command.
So, for example, there is the log command that will show commit logs.
If we want to find out more information about that, we type git help log, and
then returns the Git Manual page up here, you'll see it says Git Manual, and it
has information about git log, how to use it, description of what it does, and
the various options that we can use with the command.
Now to move forward to the next page, you can either hit the spacebar just to
move forward one page at a time, or F for Forward, or B for Backward, and that
will move you forwards and backwards as well.
When you are finally done, you can hit Q for Quit, to get out, and that will
take you back to the command line again, so F for Forward, B for Backwards, Q for Quit.
Those of you who are Unix users may recognize that Manual page is being a
typical Unix manual page--or man page for short. And in fact, it is the exact same
thing, if we say man git-log, that's the exact same page that it brings up, it's
100% the same, so git help log and man get-log are the same thing.
It just gives you a more consistent user interface through Git to get to
those manual pages.
It also reads nicely, get help on the log, right?
Get help as in G E T, get help on log, and it will then provide us with the help page.
So it makes it easy to remember.
So I encourage you to use these help pages whenever you get stuck, whenever
you're trying to figure out how to do something when you want to go a little bit
deeper or when you want to try and find out how different option works.
That's what it's there for.
These help pages are really going to be an indispensable tool when you finally
strike out on your own with Git.