System Admin  «Prev 

UNIX man manual pages

Here are the manual pages you would see if you typed man man on a Linux machine:
man(1)          man(1)
 
NAME
  man-format and display the on-line manual pages 
  manpath-determine user's search path for man pages
 
SYNOPSIS
  man [-acdfhkKtwW] [-m system] [-p string] 
    [-C config_file]
  
  [-M path] [-P pager] [-S section_list] 
    [section] name  ...
 
DESCRIPTION
  man formats and displays the on-line manual pages. 
  This version knows about the MANPATH and (MAN) PAGER environment variables, so you can have your 
  own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you like to display the formatted 
  pages. If section is specified, man only looks in  that section of the manual. You may also specify 
  the order to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the source files via 
  command line options or environment variables. If name contains a / then it is first tried as a 
  filename, so that you can do man ./foo.5or even man /cd/foo/bar.1.gz.
 

OPTIONS
  -C config_file
  Specify  the man.config file to use; the default 
  is /etc/man.config. (See man.config(5).)
 
-M path
  Specify the list of directories to search for man 
  pages. If no such option is given, the environment 
  variable MANPATH is used. If no such environment 
  variable is found, the default list is found by 
  consulting /etc/man.config. An empty substring of 
  MANPATH denotes the default list.
 
-Ppager
  Specify which pager to use. This option overrides
  the MANPAGER environment variable, which in turn
  overrides the PAGER variable. By default, man uses
  /usr/bin/less-is.
 
-Ssection_list
  List is a colon separated list of manual sections
  to search. This option overrides the MANSECT 
  environment variable.

	
-a     
  By default, man will exit after displaying the
  first manual page it finds. Using this option
  forces man to display all the manual pages that
  match name, not just the first.
 
-c     
  Reformat the source man page, even when an up-to-
  date cat page exists. This can be meaningful if 
  the cat page was formatted for a screen with a 
  different number of columns.
 
-d     
  Don't actually display the man pages, but do 
  print gobs of debugging information.
 
-D     
  Both display and print debugging info.
 
-f     
  Equivalent to whatis.
 

-h     
  Print a one-line help message and exit.
 
-k     
  Equivalent to apropos.
 
-K     
  Search for the specified string in *all* man pages. Warning: this is probably very slow! 
  It helps to specify a section. (Just to give a rough idea, on my machine this takes about 
  a minute per 500 man pages.)
 
-m  system     
  Specify an alternate set of man pages to search 
  based on the system name given.
 
-p  string     
  Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff. Not all installations 
  will have a full set of preprocessors. Some of the pre-processors and the letters used to 
  designate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), refer (r). 
	This  option overrides the MANROFFSEQ environment variable.
 
-t     
  Use /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc to format the 
  manual page, passing the output to stdout. The 
  output from /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc may 
  need to be passed through some filter or another 
  before being printed.
 
-w or --path   
  Don't actually display the man pages, but do 
  print the location(s) of the files that would be 
  formatted or displayed. If no argument is given: 
  display (on stdout) the list of directories that 
  is searched by man for man pages. If manpath is 
  a link to man, then "manpath" is equivalent to 
  "man--path".
 
-W     
  Like -w, but print file names one per line, 
  without additional information. This is useful 
  in shellcommands like man -aW man | xargs ls -l
 
CAT PAGES
  Man will try to save the formatted man pages, 
  in order to save formatting time the next time 
  these pages are needed. Traditionally, formatted 
  versions of pages in DIR/manX are saved in 
  DIR/catX, but other mappings from man dir to 
  cat dir can be specified in /etc/man.config. No 
  cat pages are saved when the required cat 
  directory does not exist.
 
  It is possible to make man suid to a user man. 
  Then, if a cat directory has owner man and mode 
  0755 (only writable by man), and the cat files 
  have owner man and mode 0644 or 0444 (only 
  writable by man, or not writable at all), no 
  ordinary user can change the cat pages or put 
  other files in the cat directory. If man is not 
  made suid, then a cat directory should have mode 
  0777 if all users should be able to leave cat 
  pages there.
 
  The option -c forces reformatting a page, even 
  if a recent cat page exists.
 
ENVIRONMENT MANPATH
  If MANPATH is set, its value is used as the 
  path to search for manual pages.
 
MANROFFSEQ
  If MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to 
  determine the set of preprocessors run before 
  running nroff or troff. By default, pages are 
  passed through the table preprocessor before 
  nroff.
 
MANSECT
  If MANSECT is set, its value is used to 
  determine which manual sections to search.
 
MANWIDTH
  If MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the 
  width manpages should be displayed. Otherwise 
  the pages may be displayed over the whole 
  width of your screen.
 
MANPAGER
  If MANPAGER is set, its value is used as the 
  name of the program to use to display the man 
  page. If not, then PAGER is used. If that has 
  no value either, /usr/bin/less -is is used.
 
LANG   
  If LANG is set, its value defines the name of 
  the subdirectory where man first looks for man 
  pages. Thus, the command `LANG=dk man 1 foo' 
  will cause man to look for the foo man page in 
  .../dk/man1/foo.1, and if it cannot find such a 
  file, then in .../man1/foo.1, where ... is a 
  directory on the search path.
 
NLSPATH, LC_MESSAGES, LANG
  The environment variables NLSPATH and 
  LC_MESSAGES (or LANG when the latter does 
  not exist) play a role in locating the message 
  catalog. (But the English messages are compiled 
  in, and for English no catalog is required.) 
  Note that programs like col(1) called by man 
  also use e.g. LC_CTYPE.
 
PATH   
  PATH is used in the construction of the 
  default search path for man pages.
 
SYSTEM 
  SYSTEM is used to get the default alternate 
  system name (for use with the -m option).
 
SEE ALSO
  apropos(1), whatis(1), less(1), groff(1).
 
BUGS
  The -t option only works if a troff-like 
  program is installed. If you see blinking 
  \255 or <AD> instead of hyphens, put 
  `LESSCHARSET=latin1' in your environment.