MAN(1) | General Commands Manual | MAN(1) |
man
— display
manual pages
man |
[-acfhklw ] [-C
file] [-M
path] [-m
path] [-S
subsection] [[-s ]
section] name ... |
The man
utility displays the manual page
entitled name. Pages may be selected according to a
specific category (section) or machine architecture
(subsection).
The options are as follows:
-a
-C
file-c
When using -c
, most terminal devices
are unable to show the markup. To print the output of
man
to the terminal with markup but without
using a pager, pipe it to
ul(1). To remove
the markup, pipe the output to
col(1)
-b
instead.
-f
-h
-a
and -c
.-k
-l
-w
are ignored. This option implies
-a
.-M
path:
’) separated list of directories.
This option also overrides the environment variable
MANPATH
and any directories specified in the
man.conf(5) file.-m
path:
’) separated list of directories.
These directories will be searched before those specified using the
-M
option, the MANPATH
environment variable, the
man.conf(5) file, or the
default directories.-S
subsectionBy default manual pages for all architectures are installed. Therefore this option can be used to view pages for one architecture whilst using another.
This option overrides the MACHINE
environment variable.
-s
] section-w
The options -IKOTW
are also supported and
are documented in mandoc(1). The
options -fkl
are mutually exclusive and override
each other.
The search starts with the -m
argument if
provided, then continues with the -M
argument, the
MANPATH
variable, the
manpath
entries in the
man.conf(5) file, or with
/usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/man
by default. Within each of these, directories are searched in the order
provided. Within each directory, the search proceeds according to the
following list of sections: 1, 8, 6, 2, 3, 5, 7, 4, 9, 3p. The first match
found is shown.
The mandoc.db(5)
database is used for looking up manual page entries. In cases where the
database is absent, outdated, or corrupt, man
falls
back to looking for files called
name.section. If both a
formatted and an unformatted version of the same manual page, for example
cat1/foo.0 and man1/foo.1,
exist in the same directory, only the unformatted version is used. The
database is kept up to date with
makewhatis(8), which is run
by the weekly(8)
maintenance script.
Guidelines for writing man pages can be found in mdoc(7).
MACHINE
man
searches any subdirectories, with the same
name as the current architecture, in every directory which it searches.
Machine specific areas are checked before general areas. The current
machine type may be overridden by setting the environment variable
MACHINE
to the name of a specific architecture, or
with the -S
option.
MACHINE
is case insensitive.MANPAGER
MANPAGER
is used instead of the standard
pagination program,
less(1). If
less(1) is used,
the interactive :t
command can be used to go to
the definitions of various terms, for example command line options,
command modifiers, internal commands, environment variables, function
names, preprocessor macros,
errno(2) values,
and some other emphasized words. Some terms may have defining text at more
than one place. In that case, the
less(1)
interactive commands t
and
T
can be used to move to the next and to the
previous place providing information about the term last searched for with
:t
. The -O
tag
[=term] option documented
in the mandoc(1) manual opens
a manual page at the definition of a specific term
rather than at the beginning.MANPATH
MANPATH
is a colon
(‘:
’) separated list of directories.
Invalid directories are ignored. Overridden by -M
,
ignored if -l
is specified.
If MANPATH
begins with a colon, it is
appended to the standard path; if it ends with a colon, it is prepended
to the standard path; or if it contains two adjacent colons, the
standard path is inserted between the colons.
PAGER
MANPAGER
is not defined. If neither PAGER nor
MANPAGER is defined,
less(1) is
used.man
configuration fileThe man
utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs. See
mandoc(1) for details.
Format a page for pasting extracts into an email message — avoid printing any UTF-8 characters, reduce the width to ease quoting in replies, and remove markup:
$ man -T ascii -O width=65 pledge |
col -b
Read a typeset page in a PDF viewer:
$ MANPAGER=mupdf man -T pdf
lpd
apropos(1), col(1), mandoc(1), ul(1), whereis(1), man.conf(5), mdoc(7)
The man
utility is compliant with the
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”)
specification.
The flags [-aCcfhIKlMmOSsTWw
], as well as
the environment variables MACHINE
,
MANPAGER
, and MANPATH
, are
extensions to that specification.
A man
command first appeared in
Version 2 AT&T UNIX.
The -w
option first appeared in
Version 7 AT&T UNIX;
-f
and -k
in
4BSD; -M
in
4.3BSD; -a
in
4.3BSD-Tahoe; -c
and
-m
in 4.3BSD-Reno;
-h
in 4.3BSD-Net/2;
-C
in NetBSD 1.0;
-s
and -S
in
OpenBSD 2.3; and -I
,
-K
, -l
,
-O
, and -W
in
OpenBSD 5.7. The -T
option
first appeared in AT&T System III UNIX
and was also added in OpenBSD 5.7.
July 20, 2020 | Linux 5.14.0-pf2 |