MANINTRO(1MAN) COMMAND REFERENCE MANINTRO(1MAN)
NAME
manintro - introduction to the online manual page system
DESCRIPTION
The online manual page system allows a user to read entries
in the user's manual and personal manual pages stored on the
system.
Manual page formats
Each manual page contains a number of sections, each of
which gives some kind of information about the subject, such
as how a command or subroutine works. The first section is
alwats the NAME section, which gives the names of the
subjects being described and a short description. Other
sections discuss the subject and give examples and related
documents.
Initial installation
When the system is first installed, the directory /usr/man
will contain the subdirectories ``man[1-8]'' and ``cat[1-
8]'' which correspond to the major manual page sections from
the printed user's manual. The `cat' directories, which
will contain the formatted manual pages will be empty. The
sections contain the following types of information:
1 Commands and command set introductions
2 System calls
3 Library subroutines
4 Special system files and hardware support
5 System file formats
6 Games (usually nonexistent)
7 Document processing macros and special concepts
8 System administration commands
Once the manual page sources are installed in the `man'
directories, the program must be run to format all of the
pages. This command may be run automatically each night by
adding an entry to the file /usr/lib/crontab (see
catman(8man) for details).
If you have your own manual pages that you would like to use
with the system, see the manual page man(5man) for more
information.
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If you do not plan to change the manual pages, you can
delete the contents of the `man' directories after catman
has formatted them all (make sure you put them somewhere,
such as on a backup disk, in case something happens to the
formatted pages). This will save disk space and will make
the nightly catman runs go faster. For the most part, it
isn't useful to keep the sources around, since the manual
page commands do not require them.
Dirstributed manual pages: If you have more than one system
and are running the distributed file system, you may want to
choose one machine on which to store the manual pages. You
can access these pages from other machines by setting up the
file /usr/lib/man/directories to contain the names of these
directories. For example, if you have two machines called
``jimshost'' and ``janeshost'' and you have the manual pages
in /usr/man on the machine ``jimshost'', users on the
machine ``janeshost'' can access the pages if the entries
//jimshost/usr/man /bin
//jimshost/usr/man /etc
are added to /usr/lib/man/directories. See man(5man) for
information about the contents of this file.
Commands
There are a number of commands which make up the online
manual page system. Following is a brief description of
each of the commands. More information is available in the
manual pages for the commands.
/bin/man This command is the interface to the
actual manual pages. It allows reading
of pages on the terminal and other
facilities related to the formatted
manual pages.
/bin/apropos This command is an interface to a set of
special database files which contain
short descriptions of all of the manual
pages. It allows searching for manual
pages based on keywords.
/bin/whatis This command is another interface to the
same files used by apropos(1man). It
allows one to get short descriptions of
manual pages by giving the subject name.
/bin/help This command is an interactive manual
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MANINTRO(1MAN) COMMAND REFERENCE MANINTRO(1MAN)
page peruser. You can read certain
sections of manual pages and look around
at other pages without leaving the
peruser.
/bin/section This command is a non-interactive
version of help(1man). You can display
sections of manual pages separately.
/etc/catman This command formats the manual pages
and executes the next two commands.
/usr/lib/makewhatis This command builds the special database
used by apropos and whatis, and creates
links to manual pages which describe
more than one subject.
/usr/lib/buildif This command builds special format
information tables for use by help and
section.
Special features
This manual page system contains features which allow users
to decide which sets of pages they want to see by default,
set up and maintain personal manual page directories. Also,
this system makes information easier to get, since each
command, subroutine, and special subject described in the
manual has a manual entry.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1man), buildif(1man), help(1man), makewhatis(1man),
man(1man), section(1man), whatis(1man), man(5man),
manindex(5man), whatis(5man), catman(8man).
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