NAME

man − run of section of UNIX manual

SYNOPSIS

man [ − ] [ −t ] [ section ] title ... 

DESCRIPTION

Man is a program which prints sections of the manual.  Section is an option arabic section number, i.e. 3, which may be followed by a single letter classifier, i.e. 1m indicating a maintenance type program in section 1.  It may also be “ucb”, “sccs”, or “public”.  If a section specifier is given man looks in the that section of the manual for the given titles.  If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual, giving preference to commands over subroutines in system libraries, and printing the first section it finds, if any.  The command apropos(UCB) can help find a command whose name has been forgotten, looking it up by kewords in its “one line” description.

If the standard output is a teletype, or if the flag − is given, then man pipes its output through ssp(UCB) to crush out useless blank lines, and through cr3(UCB) to stop after each page on the screen. Hit a carriage return to continue, a control-D to scroll 12 more lines when the output stops.

The −t flag causes man to arrange for the specified section to be troff’ed to the Versatec. 

FILES

/usr/man/man?/*

SEE ALSO

apropos(UCB), cr3(UCB), ssp(UCB), whereis(UCB)

AUTHOR

Bill Joy

BUGS

The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter or on a typewriter.  However, on a typewriter some information is necessarily lost. 

If multiple sections of the manual are to be troff’ed then it is better to run them off with vtroff(UCB)usingasequencelike

cd /usr/man/mann; vtroff -man mail.n msgs.n

since the pages will then be run in one Versatec job using less paper. 

7th Edition  —  2/24/79