MAN(5MAN)               COMMAND REFERENCE               MAN(5MAN)



NAME
     man - manual page control files and directories

DESCRIPTION
     The system contains various commands which work with manual
     pages.  This document describes the manual page naming
     conventions, the layout of the manual page file directories,
     and the format of the system control files used by these
     commands.

     Manual Page File Names

     Each manual page file name is of the form title.section .
     The title is typically the name of the command, file,
     subroutine, or concept that the page describes, but a page
     may refer to a logical grouping of these.  The section
     consists of a number from 1 to 8 followed by zero or more
     alphabetic characters.  For example, this manual page is in
     a file called man.5man, and the manual page describing the
     Bourne shell built-in command type is in a file called
     type.1sh.  If this name format is not followed, the man
     command may not be able to find the page.  The case of
     section names is ignored by the man command, so section
     `3sh' is equivalent to `3SH'.

     Manual Page Directory Layout

     The manual page commands expect to look in a directory and
     find manual page files in the subdirectories `man[1-8]' and
     `cat[1-8]', and a special database file called whatis (none
     of these are required) The directories `man[1-8]' are
     expected to contain the manual page sources, and the
     directories `cat[1-8]' are expected to contain the formatted
     pages.  The number at the end of the directory name refers
     to the section number of the manual page.  For example, the
     directories `man1' and `cat1' would contain manual page
     files with names of the form `*.1*'.

     Each command uses the subdirectories differently.  The
     command man looks only in
     `cat[1-8]' for the formatted pages.  The command catman
     reformats the pages in
     `man[1-8]' that are newer (have been modified more recently
     than) the corresponding pages in `cat[1-8]'.  The commands
     help, section, and buildif work with the manual page index
     format tables (described in manindex(5man)). The command
     makewhatis builds the special whatis database from the files
     in `cat[1-8]'.

     Manual Page Control Files





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MAN(5MAN)               COMMAND REFERENCE               MAN(5MAN)



     The directory /usr/lib/man contains two manual page control
     files: directories and sections, which are used by the
     various commands to decide which actions to take.

     The directories file contains lines of the form:

          man-directory command-directory actions

     The man-directory is the name of a directory which contains
     manual page subdirectories and a whatis database.

     The command-directory is the name of a directory which
     contains the commands corresponding to the manual pages.
     For example, the directory /usr/man contains manual pages
     for the commands contained in /bin, /usr/bin, and/etc.
     (Since there may be more than one command directory which
     corresponds to a manual page directory, multiple entries
     beginning with the same man-directory are allowed.) This
     correspondence is used by the man command to base manual
     page directory searching order on the contents of the PATH
     environment variable.

     The actions part of the line is a set of letters which tell
     the command catman what to do with the manual pages in the
     directories.  The valid actions letters are f,i, and w,
     which are described in the manual page for catman(8man).

     If a line begins with a `#', the line is ignored as a
     comment.

     The sections file contains the default section ordering used
     by the man command and is a complete list of the known
     section names.  The section names are separated by spaces,
     tabs, and newlines.

     In addition, there may be items of the form [1-8]+.  These
     are used by the catman command to decide where new
     subsections that appear should go.  For example, if the
     sections 3, 3c, 3s, 3n, and 3f exist and the users tend not
     to need Fortran (section 3f) pages, the sections file might
     contain a the sequence ``3 3c 3s 3n 3+ 3f''.  If catman
     finds a new manual page whose section name is 3e, it would
     replace the `3+' with ``3e 3+'', resulting in the sequence
     ``3 3c 3s 3n 3e 3+ 3f''.  If there are no + specifiers
     corresponding to a section, new section names are added to
     the end of the file.  See the manual page for catman for
     more information.

FILES
     /usr/lib/man/directories
                       Description of directories where manual
                       pages are found



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MAN(5MAN)               COMMAND REFERENCE               MAN(5MAN)



     /usr/lib/man/sections
                       List of known manual page sections

     man[1-8]/*        Manual page source files

     man[1-8]/*        Formatted manual page files

     whatis            Special manual page description database

CAVEATS
     The name `x[1-8]' corresponds to the list of names ``x1 x2
     x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 x8'' and not to a single name.

     The sections file may not contain comments.

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1man), buildif(1man), help(1man), makewhatis(1man),
     man(1man), section(1man), whatis(1man), manindex(5man),
     whatis(5man), and catman(8man).




































Printed 5/12/88                                                 3

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