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
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.
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MAN(5MAN) COMMAND REFERENCE MAN(5MAN)
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.
/usr/lib/man/sections List of known manual page sections.
man[1-8]/* Manual page source files.
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MAN(5MAN) COMMAND REFERENCE MAN(5MAN)
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), catman(8man).
Printed 10/17/86 3
%%index%%
na:72,83;
de:155,3296;3595,2453;
fi:6048,364;6556,187;
ca:6743,232;
se:6975,455;
%%index%%000000000114