man(1) (BSD Compatibility Package ) man(1)
NAME
man - display reference manual pages; find reference pages by keyword
SYNOPSIS
/usr/ucb/man [ - ] [ -t ] [ -M path ] [ -T macro-package ] [[ section
] title...]
title...
/usr/ucb/man [-M path] -k keyword ...
/usr/ucb/man [-M path] -f filename ...
DESCRIPTION
The man command displays information from the reference manuals. It
can display complete manual pages that you select by title, or one-
line summaries selected either by keyword (-k), or by the name of an
associated file (-f).
A section, when given, applies to the titles that follow it on the
command line (up to the next section, if any). man looks in the
indicated section of the manual for those titles. section is either
a digit (perhaps followed by a single letter indicating the type of
manual page), or one of the words new, local, old, or public. If
section is omitted, man searches all reference sections (giving
preference to commands over functions) and prints the first manual
page it finds. If no manual page is located, man prints an error
message.
The reference page sources are typically located in the
/usr/share/man/man? directories. Since these directories are
optionally installed, they may not reside on your host; you may have
to mount /usr/share/man from a host on which they do reside. If
there are preformatted, up-to-date versions in corresponding cat? or
fmt? directories, man simply displays or prints those versions. If
the preformatted version of interest is out of date or missing, man
reformats it prior to display. If directories for the preformatted
versions are not provided, man reformats a page whenever it is
requested; it uses a temporary file to store the formatted text
during display.
If the standard output is not a terminal, or if the - flag is given,
man pipes its output through cat. Otherwise, man pipes its output
through more to handle paging and underlining on the screen.
The following options are available:
-t man arranges for the specified manual pages to be troffed to a
suitable raster output device (see troff or vtroff). If both
the - and -t flags are given, man updates the troffed versions
of each named title (if necessary), but does not display them.
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man(1) (BSD Compatibility Package ) man(1)
-M path
Change the search path for manual pages. path is a colon-
separated list of directories that contain manual page
directory subtrees. When used with the -k or -f options, the
-M option must appear first. Each directory in the path is
assumed to contain subdirectories of the form man[1-8l-p].
-T macro-package
man uses macro-package rather than the standard -man macros
defined in /usr/ucblib/doctools/tmac/tmac.an for formatting
manual pages.
-k keyword ...
man prints out one-line summaries from the whatis database
(table of contents) that contain any of the given keywords.
-f filename ...
man attempts to locate manual pages related to any of the given
filenames. It strips the leading pathname components from each
filename, and then prints one-line summaries containing the
resulting basename or names.
MANUAL PAGES
Manual pages are troff or nroff source files prepared with the -man
macro package.
When formatting a manual page, man examines the first line to
determine whether it requires special processing.
Preprocessing Manual Pages
If the first line is a string of the form:
'\" X
where X is separated from the the `"' by a single SPACE and consists
of any combination of characters in the following list, man pipes its
input to troff or nroff through the corresponding preprocessors.
e eqn, or neqn for nroff
r refer
t tbl, and col for nroff
If eqn or neqn is invoked, it will automatically read the file
/usr/ucblib/pub/eqnchar [see eqnchar(7)].
ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH If set, its value overrides /usr/share/man as the
default search path. The -M flag, in turn, overrides
this value.
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man(1) (BSD Compatibility Package ) man(1)
PAGER A program to use for interactively delivering man's
output to the screen. If not set, `more -s' (see
more) is used.
TCAT The name of the program to use to display troffed
manual pages. If not set, `lp -Ttroff' (see lp) is
used.
TROFF The name of the formatter to use when the -t flag is
given. If not set, troff is used.
FILES
/usr/share/man root of the standard manual page directory
subtree
/usr/share/man/man?/* unformatted manual entries
/usr/share/man/cat?/* nroffed manual entries
/usr/share/man/fmt?/* troffed manual entries
/usr/share/man/whatis table of contents and keyword database
/usr/ucblib/doctools/tmac/man.macs
standard -man macro package
/usr/ucblib/pub/eqnchar
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), cat(1), catman(1M), col(1), eqn(1), nroff(1), refer(1),
tbl(1), troff(1), whatis(1), eqnchar(7).
col(1), lp(1), more(1) in the User's Reference Manual.
NOTES
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on a phototypesetter
or on an ASCII terminal. However, on a terminal some information
(indicated by font changes, for instance) is necessarily lost.
Some dumb terminals cannot process the vertical motions produced by
the e (eqn(1)) preprocessing flag. To prevent garbled output on
these terminals, when you use e also use t, to invoke col(1)
implicitly. This workaround has the disadvantage of eliminating
superscripts and subscripts - even on those terminals that can
display them. CTRL-Q will clear a terminal that gets confused by
eqn(1) output.
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