MAN(1) — USER COMMANDS

NAME

man − print out manual pages; find manual information by keywords

SYNOPSIS

man [ − ] [ −t ] [ −P path ] [ section ] title ...
man −k keyword ...
man −f file ...

DESCRIPTION

Man displays information from the UNIX System manual pages. Man can be asked for one line descriptions of commands specified by name, or for all commands whose description contains any of a set of keywords. Man can also provide on-line access to the sections of the printed manual.

Man’s standard behavior when neither the −k nor −f option is specified (see OPTIONS below) is to format a specified set of manual pages. In the absence of any specific options to the contrary, man looks for already formatted manuals in the /usr/man/cat? directories and uses the information cached there. Otherwise, man must format the pages on the fly — in this case you get a message asking you to wait patiently.

If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual, giving preference to commands over subroutines in system libraries, and prints the first section it finds, if any.

If a section is specified, man looks in that section of the manual for the given titles. Section is an arabic section number (‘3’ for instance); the number may be followed by a single letter classifier (‘1g’, for instance, indicating a graphics program in Section 1). Finally, section can be one of the keywords ‘public’, ‘local’, ‘old’, or ‘new’.

If the standard output is a terminal, or if you use the − flag, man pipes its output through cat(1) with the −s option to crush out useless blank lines, ul(1) to create proper underlines for different terminals, and through more(1) to stop after each page on the screen. Type a space to continue, and a control-D to scroll 11 more lines when the output stops.

OPTIONS

−P path
Use path as the starting pathname for the manual pages. Manual page sections must reside in path/man? instead of in /usr/man/man?

−k keywords
Display a one line synopsis of each manual section whose listing in the table of contents contains any of the keywords.

−f filenames
Attempt to locate manual sections related to those files, and display the table of contents lines for those sections.

−tUse troff to format the specified section, assuming you have a suitable raster output device which can actually handle troff’s output.

FILES

/usr/man/man?/∗manual pages in nroff/troff source
/usr/man/cat?/∗formatted manual pages

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