4.2.2. Getting help on using commands

In most cases, you can see the complete list of options a command supports using --help:

ls --help

Output:

Usage: ls [OPTION]... [FILE]...
List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default).
Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort is specified.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
  -a, --all                  do not ignore entries starting with .

...

Note

To keep this discussion short, the examples in this section, only includes some options supported by a command.