man(1) — USER COMMANDS

NAME

man − display reference manual pages; find reference pages by keyword

SYNOPSIS

/usr/ucb/man [ − ] [ −t ] [ −M path ] [ −T macro-package ]
[ −v version ] [[ 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, or one of the words new, local, old, or public. If section is a digit, it can be followed by a single letter indicating the type of manual page. man is not sensitive to the case of the letter, i.e. the letter can be in either upper case or lower case. 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 If the preformatted version of interest is out-of-date or missing, man reformats it prior to display.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, using 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.

−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.

−v version ...
man attempts to locate the version of the title manual page. If a version of the manual page does not exist man returns an error. For example, enter:

$ man -v bsd ls

to see the BSD version of the ls(1) manual page.

The versions are:

bsd BSD

xen XENIX

s5 s5 file system

nfs nfs file system

bfs bfs file system

ufs ufs file system

rfs rfs file system

If −v is not specified man prints the first manual page it finds.

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 ‘"’ 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(5)].

ENVIRONMENT

MANPATH If set, its value overrides /usr/share/man as the default search path. The −M flag, in turn, overrides this value.

PAGER A program to use for interactively delivering man’s output to the screen. If not set, ‘more −s’ (see more(1)) is used.

TCAT The name of the program to use to display troffed manual pages. If not set, ‘lp −Ttroff’ (see lp(1)) is used.

TROFF The name of the formatter to use when the −t flag is given. If not set, troff is used.

NOTES

man(1) uses whatis databases to find the appropriate manual pages. If a whatis database is not present in a directory in the MANPATH, a warning message will be printed, and man will search the directories in MANPATH for files whose prefix is "title". mkapropos (see mkapropos(1m)) can be used to generate whatis databases.

Related manual pages for commands on one manual page may be directly accessed. For example enter:

$ man strcat

to see the manual page for string where strcat is documented.

A manual page is 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.

Online manual pages are provided as part of this product. If you have any trouble finding the online documentation for a command, use the apropos(1) command.

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