Chapter 2. Getting help
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## Chapter 2. Getting help

To get help when using pkgsrc, the definitive source is this document, the pkgsrc guide. If you don't find anything here, there are alternatives:

- The built-in pkgsrc help, which is available after bootstrapping pkgsrc. Run bmake help topic=… to get help for any topic, such as a variable name like `BUILD_DEFS`, a make target like do-build, a missing C or C++ function like strcasecmp or any other topic.

  The available help topics are listed in Appendix E, Help topics.

- To see the value of a single variable, run bmake show-var VARNAME=`X`.

- To see the values of the most common variables, run bmake show-all. These variables are grouped by topic. To see the variables for a single topic, run bmake show-all-`topic`, for example bmake show-all-fetch.

- The pkgsrc-users mailing list, to which you can subscribe and then ask your questions.

- The #pkgsrc IRC channel, which is accessible via a web browser or by using a specialized chat program such as XChat. Pick any user name and join the channel #pkgsrc.

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