NAME

man − print sections of this manual

SYNOPSIS

man [ option ... ] [ chapters ] title ... 

DESCRIPTION

Man locates and prints the section of this manual named title in the specified chapters. (In this context, the word ’page’ is often used as a synonym for ’section’.)  The title is entered in lower case.  The chapter numbers do not need a letter suffix.  If no chapters are specified, the whole manual is searched for title and the first occurrence of it is printed. 

From the CRT, a call to man with a title or topic name prints out the specified manual section in nroff’ed form on the CRT, automatically piping it through more. 

Manual sections may be preprocessed by nroff and put in cat files, as in

/usr/cat?/*

If necessary, specific options may be added to print out manual sections in the desired form on the desired medium. 

Options and their meanings are:

−t Phototypeset the section using troff(1).

−n Print the section on the standard output using nroff(1).

−k Display the output on a Tektronix 4014 terminal using troff(1) and tc(1).

−e Appended or prefixed to any of the above causes the manual section to be preprocessed by neqn or eqn(1); −e alone means −te. 

−w Print the path names of the manual sections, but do not print the sections themselves. 

−m Pipe the manual sections through more. 

−u Pipe the manual sections through ul. 

−s Remove extra blank lines as if the sections were being piped through ssp. 

−d If one only has an nroff’able copy then use deroff instead of nroff. 

−f stop after the first file is found. 

−p Look for the files in the current directory. 

− A single − will reset all options. 

(default)
Copy an already formatted manual section to the terminal, or, if none is available, act as −n.  It may be necessary to use a filter to adapt the output to the particular terminal’s characteristics. 

If the output device is a terminal then the f, s, m and u options will be set unless turned off by the − option. 

Options and chapters may be changed before each title.

EXAMPLE

For example:

man getc

would print out the manual page on "getc" from Section 3. 

man 2 chmod

would print out the section 2 chapter on chmod, which comes from

/usr/man/man2/chmod.2.

If the "2" had not been specified in the request, the section 1 chapter on chmod would have been retrieved, since that would have been the first chapter on chmod that man found. 

FILES

...man/man?/∗
...man/cat?/∗     for preprocessed manual sections.

SEE ALSO

nroff(1), eqn(1), tc(1), man(7)

BUGS

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

Some of the fancy options have not been fully tested or debugged. 

7th Edition  —  1/25/82