VOS_HELP(1)

💖 VOS_HELP — the vibes edition 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to VOS_HELP(1) from the AFS Command Reference ✨ this is the page that teaches you how to make vos explain itself. no cap, it's the "help me help you" command 🫶

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🌸 NAME 🌸

vos_help — displays help for vos commands. that's it, that's the whole job, and she does it flawlessly 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

vos help [-topic <help string>+] [-help]

vos h [-t <help string>+] [-h]

literally the shortest glow-up ever. vos help and vos h are the same girl, different outfit 👑

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so the vos help command shows you the complete online help entry — that's the short description and the syntax statement — for every command operation code you name in the -topic argument. iconic behaviour, honestly.

and if you just... don't pass -topic at all? she doesn't gatekeep. the output gives you the first line (name + short description) of the online help entry for every vos command. a full tour of the whole friend group 💖

oh and psst — if you're trying to find every vos command whose name or short description has some keyword in it, that's a different girl. use the vos apropos command for that. iykyk 🔍

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -topic <help string>+ — tells her which command to show you the full online help entry for. heads up tho: you drop the vos part of the name and give her only the operation code (so like, write create, not vos create, bestie 🙈). and if you skip this argument entirely, the output briefly describes every single vos command. no pressure either way 🌈
• -help — prints the online help for this command. and listen: all other valid options get ignored when you use this. she's not multitasking. periodt 💅

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👑 OUTPUT 👑

the online help entry for each vos command is made of these two or three lines:

• The first line names the command and briefly describes its function.
• The second line lists aliases for the command, if any.
• The final line, which begins with the string "Usage", lists the command's options in the prescribed order. Online help entries use the same symbols (for example, brackets) as the reference pages in this document.

so yes, the format is consistent and yes, that is a slay ✨

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🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

the following command displays the online help entry for the vos create command:

% vos help create
vos create: create a new volume
Usage: vos create -server <machine name> -partition <partition name>
-name <volume name> [-cell <cell name>] [-noauth] [-localauth]
[-verbose] [-help]

look at her go 😭💖

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🌈 PRIVILEGE REQUIRED 🌈

None. zero. nada. you need no special powers for this one — she's accessible to everyone, as she should be 🫶

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

vos(1), vos_apropos(1)

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💜 COPYRIGHT 💜

IBM Corporation 2000. <http://www.ibm.com/> All Rights Reserved.

This documentation is covered by the IBM Public License Version 1.0. It was converted from HTML to POD by software written by Chas Williams and Russ Allbery, based on work by Alf Wachsmann and Elizabeth Cassell.

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🍓 real talk: this is OpenAFS, dated 2026-07-27, and she's serving VOS_HELP(1) energy all day long. go read some help entries, bestie — you're gonna eat 💅✨