You must not know about man -k yet.  Man -k will do a keyword search.

so if you do
man -k swap

it will show you the man pages with swap in the summary line

here's an example output.

mkswap               (8)  - set up a Linux swap area
swapoff [swapon]     (2)  - start/stop swapping to file/device
swapoff [swapon]     (8)  - enable/disable devices and files for paging and
			    swapping
swapon               (2)  - start/stop swapping to file/device
swapon               (8)  - enable/disable devices and files for paging and
			    swapping

Check these guys out ...

Oh you probably have to change the filesystem type to linux swap also (fdisk).

Austin

PS - This was supposed to send long ago ... but since no one has mentioned the 
apropos option for man yet ...

Rob Wultsch wrote:
> I searched tfw and could not find much. What is command to initalize a 
> swap partition to make it ready for use from the command line? I will 
> happily read tfm if I knew which one to read...
> 
> Thanks