Manual

From Hackepedia
Jump to navigationJump to search

Most UNIX systems have online manual pages.

MAN(1)                     OpenBSD Reference Manual                     MAN(1)
NAME
    man - display the on-line manual pages
SYNOPSIS
    man [-achw] [-C file] [-M path] [-m path] [-S subsection] [-s section]
        [section] name [...]
    man -f command
    man -k keyword
DESCRIPTION


The types of manpages have sections which they are grouped in. Here is the manual page layout of BSD:


Section 1
General commands (tools and utilities)
Section 2
System calls and error numbers
Section 3
Library functions, especially for C and Tk
Section 4
Special files and hardware support
Section 5
File formats, especially configuration files
Section 6
Games
Section 7
Miscellaneous information pages
Section 8
System maintenance and operation commands
Section 9
Kernel internals


When someone tells you to run "man 6 tetris", that means that you should read the tetris manpage found in section 6 of the manpages. Sometimes the same manpage name exists, but in different sections. One example is the fstat manpage it exists in sections 1 and 2. The lower number sections take precedence over higher numbered sections. Thus, to see the manpage for fstat in section 2 you would type:

$ man 2 fstat

Similarely functions, syscalls or commands are sometimes mentioned with the section of manpages in brackets behind them like so: fstat(2), you'll see this mentioned a lot in this wiki.


Searching Manual Pages

It is possible to do a keyword search in the manpage system.

$ man -k filesystem
OpenBSD::Vstat (3p) - virtual filesystem for pkg_add(1) simulations
dump (8) - filesystem backup
fstab (5) - static information about the filesystems
...

Another command synonymous to man -k is apropos:

$ apropos archiver
tar (1) - tape archiver

Do notice that the section of the manpage are displayed in the keyword search, this is to ease viewing the particular manpage. Do note that when you are on Solaris you may have to build the manual page index in order to search for keywords. This is done with the catman command:

$ catman -w 


Location of Manual Pages

In BSD the default manual pages are located in /usr/share/man. This can be changed with the MANPATH environment variable:

$ export MANPATH=/usr/local/man
$ man ls
man: no entry for ls in the manual. 
$ unset MANPATH
$ man ls
LS(1)                      OpenBSD Reference Manual                      LS(1)
...

Another manpage section can be added on to the current MANPATH:

$ export MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/usr/local/man