NAME

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

SYNOPSIS

man −k keyword ... 
man −f file ... 
man [ − ] [ −t ] [ section ] title ... 

DESCRIPTION

Man is a program which gives information from the DYNIX Programmer’s 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 section whose listing in the table of contents contains that keyword. 

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.  This is the same as whatis (1). 

When neither −k nor −f is specified, man formats a specified set of manual pages.  If a section identifier is given, man looks in that section of the manual for the given titles.  Section is an Arabic section number (3 for instance).  The number may be followed by a single letter classifier (1g for instance) indicating a graphics 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. 

If the standard output is a teletype, or if the flag − is given, man pipes its output through cat(1) with the option −s to delete superfluous blank lines, through ul(1) to create proper underlines for different terminals, and through more(1) to stop after each page on the screen. Hit a space to continue or a control-D to scroll more lines when the output stops. The use of more(1) as the pager can be changed by setting the environment variable PAGER.

The −t flag causes man to arrange for the specified section to be troffed to a suitable raster output device; see vtroff(1). The environment variable MANTROFF is intepreted as a printf-style string to generate the shell command that formats the specified section. The default string is: troff -t -man /usr/lib/tmac/tmac.vcat %s | /usr/lib/rvsort  | /usr/ucb/vpr -t

Manual pages aliases are kept in /usr/man/aliases. 

FILES

/usr/man/man?/∗
/usr/man/cat?/∗
/usr/man/aliases

SEE ALSO

more(1), ul(1), whatis(1), catman(8)

BUGS

The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter or on a typewriter.  However, on a typewriter some information is necessarily lost. 

4BSD