NAME

man − find manual information by keywords; print out the manual

SYNOPSIS

man [ − ] [ −M path ] [ bsd ] [ section ] title ... 
man −k keyword ... 
man −f file ... 

DESCRIPTION

man is a program which gives information from the programmers manual.  It can be asked for one line descriptions of commands specified by name, or for all commands whose description contains any of a set of keywords.  It can also provide on-line access to the sections of the printed manual. 

When given the option −k and a set of keywords, man prints out a one-line synopsis of each manual sections whose listing in the table of contents contains one of those keywords. 

When given the option −f and a list of file names, man attempts to locate manual sections related to those files, printing out the table of contents lines for those sections. 

When neither −k nor −f is specified, man formats a specified set of manual pages.  If a section specifier is given man looks in the that section of the manual for the given titles.  Section is either an Arabic section number (3 for instance), or one of the words “new,” “local,” “old,” or “public.” A section number may be followed by a single letter classifier (for instance, 1m, indicating an administration program in section 1).  If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual, giving preference to commands over subroutines in system libraries, and printing the first section it finds, if any. 

When given the option bsd, man looks only for man pages related to commands and subroutines from the 4.3 BSD distribution. 

If the standard output is a teletype, or if the flag − is given, man pipes its output through more(1) with the option −s to crush out useless blank lines and to stop after each page on the screen.  Hit a space to continue, a control-D to scroll 11 more lines when the output stops. 

Normally man checks in a standard location for manual information (/usr/man).  This can be changed by supplying a search path (a la the shell) with the −M flag.  The search path is a colon (‘:’) separated list of directories in which manual subdirectories may be found; e.g. “/usr/local:/usr/man”. 

MANPATH

If the environment variable ‘MANPATH’ is set, its value is used for the default path.  If a search path is supplied with the −k or −f options, it must be specified first. 

FILES

/usr/manstandard manual area
/usr/man/cat?/∗directories containing preformatted pages
/usr/man/whatiskeyword database
/usr/man/cat?/Indexindex of entries and filenames
/usr/man/bsd/cat?/∗standard manual area for bsd pages

SEE ALSO

apropos(1), more(1), man(5), catman(8)

September 29, 2021