man Command man Print online manual sections man [-w] [topic ...] man prints the COHERENT lexicon entries for each specified topic on the standard output. It uses scat to display text (with the -s option to suppress blank lines). With no arguments, man prints a list of each available topic. When used with the -w option, it prints the path name of the file instead of printing the document itself. If environmental variable PAGER is defined, man will ``pipe'' its output through the command specified in PAGER. For example, the .profile command line: export PAGER="exec /bin/scat -1" would invoke /bin/scat with the command line argument -1 (the digit one). ***** Manual-Page Control Files ***** The man command uses two control files when processing manual- page requests. File /usr/man/man.help contains the man's help message. This includes a list of valid topics and some ex- planatory text. The second control file, /usr/man/man.index, contains index entries for all manual pages on the system. Lines in this text file are of the form: relative-path-name topic where relative-path-name gives the subdirectory and file in /usr/man that hold the manual-page entry, and topic gives a manual-page topic associated with this file. For example, entries COHERENT/ascii ascii COHERENT/ascii ASCII local/chess chess associate system manual-page /usr/man/COHERENT/ascii with either upper- or lower-case spellings of topic ascii. Similarly, rules for a user-written chess game are found in file /usr/man/local/chess and are retrieved using topic chess. COHERENT Lexicon Page 1
man Command man ***** Adding Manual-Page Entries ***** When writing new manual-page entries for COHERENT, we recommend that you place them in subdirectories of /usr/man. These sub- directories should be uniquely named to avoid possible name-space collisions. A good rule-of-thumb is to name the subdirectory after the application with which it is associated. This also allows them to be updated easily, as all manual-pages associated with a given application reside in a specific subdirectory. When you add manual-page entries to the system, you should also append a list of topics to /usr/man/man.help. In addition, you must append a line to the end of file /usr/man/man.index for each newly added topic. ***** Files ***** /usr/man/* -- Directories that hold manual pages ***** See Also ***** commands, help, install, PAGER, scat COHERENT Lexicon Page 2