MAN(1,C)                    AIX Commands Reference                     MAN(1,C)



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man



PURPOSE

Displays manual entries on-line.

SYNTAX


        +-----+  +- /user/man -+  +-----------+  +-----------+
      +-|     |--|             |--|           |--|           |---+
      | +- - -+  +- -Mpath ----+  +- section -+  +-- title --+   |
man --|                                           ^         |    |--|
      |                                           +---------+    |
      |------------- -k --- keyword -----------------------------|
      |                  ^           |                           |
      |                  +-----------+                           |
      +------------- -f --- file --------------------------------+
                         ^        |
                         +--------+


Note:  This command does not have MBCS support.

DESCRIPTION

The man command provides online access to sections of the printed manuals,
displaying information about commands, system calls, file formats, and other
AIX technical information.  With the man command, you can ask for one-line
descriptions of commands specified by name, or for all commands whose
description contains any of a set of keywords.

The man command formats a specified set of manual pages.  If a section argument
is given, the man command looks in that section of the manual for the given
title.  The section argument can be either a section number or one of the
following characters:

Character   Meaning
C           Commands including system management commands.
F           Files.
L           Library functions.
n           New.
l           Local.
o           Old.
p           Public.

A section number can be followed by a single letter classifier (for example,
"1g" indicates a graphics program in section 1).  If section is omitted, the
man command searches all sections of the manual, giving preference to commands



Processed November 8, 1990         MAN(1,C)                                   1

MAN(1,C)                    AIX Commands Reference                     MAN(1,C)



over subroutines in system libraries, and printing the first section it finds,
if any.

Unless the standard output is a teletype or the - flag is used, the man command
pipes its output through the more command with the -s option to eliminate
useless blank lines and to stop after each page on the screen.  When viewing
documentation, you can press the space bar to continue to the next page and
Ctrl-D to scroll 11 more lines.

FLAGS

-f file     Attempts to locate manual sections related to the specified files,
            displaying the table of contents lines for those sections.

-k keyword  Displays a one-line synopsis of each manual section whose listing
            in the table of contents contains one of the keywords.

-Mpath      Specifies a search path that man searches for manual information
            (normally /usr/man).  The search path is a colon-separated (:) list
            of directories in which manual subdirectories can be found; for
            example /usr/local:/usr/man.  If the environment variable MANPATH
            is set, its value is used for the default path.  If the -k or -f
            flag is used, the -M flag must precede it.

FILES

/usr/man/cat?/*   Directories that man searches for preformatted pages.
/usr/man/whatis   Keyword data base.

RELATED INFORMATION

See the following commands:  "apropos,"  "more, page,"  "whereis," and
"catman."






















Processed November 8, 1990         MAN(1,C)                                   2