NAME

man - display reference manual pages; find reference pages by keyword

SYNOPSIS

man [ section ] title
man -k keyword
man -f filename

DESCRIPTION

The man command displays information from the reference manuals. It can display complete manual pages that you select by title, or one-line summaries selected either by keyword (-k), or by the name of an associated file (-f). A section, when given, applies to the titles that follow it on the command line (up to the next section, if any). man looks in the indicated section of the manual for those titles. section is a digit perhaps followed by a single letter indicating the type of manual page. If section is omitted, man searches all reference sections (giving preference to commands over functions). If multiple pages are found for a single request, man will present a menu of the man pages which can be viewed. man will not present the selection menu if its output is redirected. If no manual page is located, man prints an error message. The formatted manual pages are located in /usr/share/catman. The reference page sources are typically located in /usr/share/man. A source man page does not need to exist if there is a preformatted page. Either the source or pre-formatted page may be compressed; man will use zcat if it needs to access the page. If the preformatted version of interest is out of date or missing, man will reformat it prior to display. If the standard output is not a terminal man pipes its output through cat. Otherwise, man pipes its output through more to handle paging and underlining on the screen. The following options are available: -k keyword ... man prints out one-line summaries from the whatis database (table of contents) that contain any of the given keywords.

-f filename ...

man attempts to locate manual pages related to any of the given filenames. It strips the leading pathname components from each filename, and then prints one-line summaries containing the resulting basename or names.

MANUAL PAGES

Manual pages are troff or nroff source files prepared with the -man macro package.

ENVIRONMENT

MANPATH If set, its value overrides /usr/share/man as the default search path.

CATPATH If set, its value overrides /usr/catman as the default path for the pre-formatted manual pages. PAGER A program to use for interactively delivering man's output to the screen. If not set, `more -s' (see more) is used.

FILES

/usr/share/man           root of the  standard  manual  page
                         directory subtree
/usr/share/man/man?/*    unformatted manual entries
/usr/share/man/cat?/*    nroffed manual entries
/usr/share/man/whatis    table of contents and keyword data-
                         base
/usr/ucblib/doctools/tmac/man.macs
                         standard -man macro package
/usr/ucblib/pub/eqnchar

SEE ALSO

apropos(1), cat(1), catman(1M),  col(1),  eqn(1),  nroff(1),
refer(1),  tbl(1), troff(1), whatis(1), eqnchar(7).  col(1),
lp(1), more(1) in the User's Reference Manual.

NOTES

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 necessarily lost. output.