Always remember that PEAR has a help command:

$ pear help
.. list of commands follows .. 

Command examples will have a dollar sign $ before each line that is typed. This helps to distinguish input from the output of the PEAR installer.

$ is just an example for a command prompt. Depending on your distribution or personal preferences, your shell might display a username, often combined with the current path: joe:~/some/path>

Help for a command is just as easy to get:

$ pear help <command>
$ pear help install
.. help for install follows ..