man(1) man(1)
NAME
man - display reference manual pages; find reference pages by
keyword
SYNOPSIS
man [-] [-t] [-M path] [-T macro-package ]
[[section] title . . . ] title . . .
man [-M path] -k keyword . . .
man [-M path] -f file . . .
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interest is out of date or missing, man reformats it prior to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.
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The following options are available:
-t man arranges for the specified manual pages to be troffed
to a suitable raster output device [see troff(1BSD)]. 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/an for
formatting manual pages [see man(5BSD)].
When specifying the -T option to man, the full path must
be given. For example:
man -T /usr/ucblib/doctools/tmac/bib ls
-k keyword . . .
man prints out one-line summaries from the whatis
database (table of contents) that contain any of the
given keywords.
-f file . . .
man attempts to locate manual pages related to any of the
given files. It strips the leading pathname components
from each file, 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
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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(5BSD)].
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) 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/an
standard -man macro package
/usr/ucblib/pub/eqnchar
REFERENCES
apropos(1BSD), cat(1), catman(1M_BSD), col(1), eqn(1BSD),
eqnchar(5BSD), lp(1), man(5BSD), more(1), nroff(1BSD),
refer(1BSD), tbl(1BSD), troff(1BSD), whatis(1BSD)
NOTICES
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on a
phototypesetter or on an ASCII terminal. However, on a
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man(1) man(1)
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(1BSD)] 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 dis-
advantage of eliminating superscripts and subscripts - even on
those terminals that can display them. CTRL-Q will clear a
terminal that gets confused by eqn(1BSD) output.
Copyright 1994 Novell, Inc. Page 4