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 on-line 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. 

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 an arabic section number, i.e. 3, which may be followed by a single letter classifier, i.e. 1g 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 display manager pad or an SIO line, or if the flag − is given, then man pipes its output through cat(1) with the option −s to crush out useless blank lines and more(1) to create proper underlines for different terminals. If a pre-formatted manual page exists in the directory /usr/man/cat?, and if standard output is connected to a pad, man opens a read window and displays the manual page. 

The −t flag causes man to arrange for the specified section to be troff’ed to a suitable raster output device; see vtroff(1).

FILES

/usr/man/man?/*
/usr/man/cat?/*

SEE ALSO

more(1), whereis(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.