| MAN(1) | User Commands | MAN(1) |
man — find and
display reference manual pages
man |
[-] [-adFlrt]
[-T macro-package]
[-M path]
[-s section]
name ... |
man |
[-M path]
[-s section]
-k keyword
... |
man |
[-M path]
[-s section]
-f file ... |
man |
[-M path]
-w |
The man command displays information from
the reference manuals. It displays complete manual pages that you select by
name, or one-line summaries selected either by
keyword (-k), or by the name
of an associated file (-f). If no manual page is
located, man prints an error message.
Reference Manual pages are marked up with either
man(7), or
mdoc(7) language tags. The
man command recognizes the type of markup and
processes the file accordingly.
The online Reference Manual page directories are conventionally
located in /usr/share/man. Each directory
corresponds to a section of the manual. Since these directories are
optionally installed, they might not reside on your host. You might have to
mount /usr/share/man from a host on which they do
reside. The man command reformats a page whenever it
is requested.
If the standard output is not a terminal, or if the
- flag is given, man pipes
its output through cat(1). Otherwise,
man pipes its output through a pager such as
more(1) to handle paging and underlining
on the screen.
The following options are supported:
-aMANPATH search path. Manual pages are displayed in
the order found.-dman.-f
file ...-F-k
keyword ...-w option.-l-M
pathman searches for name in the
standard location, and then /usr/local/man. When
used with the -k, -f, or
-w options, the -M option
must appear first. Each directory in the path is
assumed to contain subdirectories of the form
man*, one for each section. This option overrides
the MANPATH environment variable.-r-s
sectionman to
search. The directories searched for name are
limited to those specified by section.
section can be a numerical digit, perhaps followed
by one or more letters to match the desired section of the manual, for
example, 3head. Also,
section can be a word, for example,
local, new,
old, public.
section can also be a letter. To specify multiple
sections, separate each section with a comma. This option overrides the
MANPATH environment variable and the
man.cf file. See
Search Path below for an explanation
of how man conducts its search.-t-T
macro-package-wwhatis database.The following operand is supported:
The usage of man is described below:
Entries in the reference manuals are organized into
sections.
A section name consists of a major section name, typically a single digit,
optionally followed by a subsection name, typically one or more letters. An
unadorned major section name, for example, "9", does not act as an
abbreviation for the subsections of that name, such as "9e",
"9f", or "9s". That is, each subsection must be searched
separately by man -s. Each
section contains descriptions apropos to a particular reference category,
with subsections refining these distinctions. See the
intro
manual pages for an explanation of the classification used in this
release.
Before searching for a given name,
man constructs a list of candidate directories and
sections. It searches for name in the directories
specified by the MANPATH environment variable.
In the absence of MANPATH,
man constructs its search path based upon the
PATH environment variable, primarily by substituting
man for the last component of the
PATH element. Special provisions are added to
account for unique characteristics of directories such as
/sbin, /usr/ucb,
/usr/xpg4/bin, and others. If the file argument
contains a "/" character, the
dirname portion
of the argument is used in place of PATH elements to
construct the search path.
Within the manual page directories, man
confines its search to the sections specified in the following order:
-s optionMANPATH environment variableMANPATH environment variableman searches each directory
in the manual page path, and displays the first matching manual page found.
The man.cf file has the following format:
MANSECTS=section[,section]...Lines beginning with ‘#’ and
blank lines are considered comments, and are ignored. Each directory
specified in MANPATH can contain a manual page
configuration file, specifying the default search order for that
directory.
If the first line of the manual page is a reference to another manual page entry fitting the pattern:
.so
man*/sourcefileman processes the indicated file in place
of the current one. The reference must be expressed as a path name relative
to the root of the manual page directory subtree.
When the second or any subsequent line starts with
.so,
man ignores it;
troff(1) or
nroff(1) processes the request in the
usual manner.
See environ(7) for
descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the
execution of man: LANG,
LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE,
LC_MESSAGES, and
NLSPATH.
MANPATH-M and -s
flags, in turn, override these values.MANWIDTHPAGERmore
-s’ is used. See
more(1).The man utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs.
The following example spools the pipe(2) man page in PostScript to the default printer:
% man -t -s 2 pipeNote that mandoc(1) can be used to obtain the PostScript content directly.
The following example creates the pipe(2) man page in ASCII text:
% man pipe.2 | col -x -b >
pipe.textEnabled.
apropos(1), cat(1), col(1), mandoc(1), more(1), whatis(1), environ(7), man(7), mdoc(7)
The -f and -k
options use the whatis database, which is created
with the -w option.
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on a phototypesetter or on an ASCII terminal. However, on a terminal some information (indicated by font changes, for instance) is lost.
| May 13, 2017 | OmniOS |