Name
man
Synopsis
man [options
] [section
] [title
]
Displays information from the online reference manuals.
man
locates and prints the named
title from the designated reference
section.
Options
-
-a
Show all pages matching title.
-
-b
Leave blank lines in output.
-
-d
Display debugging information. Suppress actual printing of manual pages.
-
-f
Same as
whatis
command.-
-k
Same as
apropos
command.-
-m
systems,
--
systems
=
systems
Search systems' manual pages. systems should be a comma-separated list.
-
-p
preprocessors,
--
processor
=
processors
Preprocess manual pages with preprocessors before turning them over to
nroff
,troff
, orgroff
. Always runssoelim
first.-
-t
Format the manual page with
troff
.-
-w
Print pathnames of entries on standard output.
-
-M
path,
--
manpath
=
path
Search for manual pages in path. Ignore
-m
option.-
-P
pager,
--
pager
=
pager
Select paging program pager to display the entry.
Section names
Manual pages are divided into sections, depending on their intended audience:
- 1
Executable programs or shell commands
- 2
System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
- 3
Library calls (functions within system libraries)
- 4
Special files (usually found in
/dev
)- 5
File formats and conventions
- 6
Games
- 7
Macro packages and conventions
- 8
System administration commands (usually only for a privileged user)
- 9
Kernel routines (nonstandard)
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