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<!DOCTYPE HTML><HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Manpage of MAN</TITLE>
<link href="style/simple.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="default" id="style" /></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>MAN</H1>
Section: Manual pager utils (1)<BR>Updated: 2016-12-12<BR>
<HR>
<A NAME="lbAB"> </A>
<H2>NAME</H2>
man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
<A NAME="lbAC"> </A>
<H2>SYNOPSIS</H2>
<B>man</B>
[<B>-C</B>
<I>file</I>]
[<B>-d</B>]
[<B>-D</B>]
[<B>--warnings</B>[=<I>warnings</I>]]
[<B>-R</B>
<I>encoding</I>]
[<B>-L</B>
<I>locale</I>]
[<B>-m</B>
<I>system</I>[,...]]
[<B>-M</B>
<I>path</I>]
[<B>-S</B>
<I>list</I>]
[<B>-e</B>
<I>extension</I>]
[<B>-i</B>|<B>-I</B>]
[<B>--regex</B>|<B>--wildcard</B>]
[<B>--names-only</B>]
[<B>-a</B>]
[<B>-u</B>]
[<B>--no-subpages</B>]
[<B>-P</B>
<I>pager</I>]
[<B>-r</B>
<I>prompt</I>]
[<B>-7</B>]
[<B>-E</B>
<I>encoding</I>]
[<B>--no-hyphenation</B>]
[<B>--no-justification</B>]
[<B>-p</B>
<I>string</I>]
[<B>-t</B>]
[<B>-T</B>[<I>device</I>]]
[<B>-H</B>[<I>browser</I>]]
[<B>-X</B>[<I>dpi</I>]]
[<B>-Z</B>]
[[<I>section</I>]
<I>page</I>[.<I>section</I>] ...] ...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
<B>-k</B>
[<I>apropos</I>
<I>options</I>]
<I>regexp</I>
...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
<B>-K</B>
[<B>-w</B>|<B>-W</B>]
[<B>-S</B>
<I>list</I>]
[<B>-i</B>|<B>-I</B>]
[<B>--regex</B>]
[<I>section</I>]
<I>term</I> ...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
<B>-f</B>
[<I>whatis</I>
<I>options</I>]
<I>page</I>
...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
<B>-l</B>
[<B>-C</B>
<I>file</I>]
[<B>-d</B>]
[<B>-D</B>]
[<B>--warnings</B>[=<I>warnings</I>]]
[<B>-R</B>
<I>encoding</I>]
[<B>-L</B>
<I>locale</I>]
[<B>-P</B>
<I>pager</I>]
[<B>-r</B>
<I>prompt</I>]
[<B>-7</B>]
[<B>-E</B>
<I>encoding</I>]
[<B>-p</B>
<I>string</I>]
[<B>-t</B>]
[<B>-T</B>[<I>device</I>]]
[<B>-H</B>[<I>browser</I>]]
[<B>-X</B>[<I>dpi</I>]]
[<B>-Z</B>]
<I>file</I>
...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
<B>-w</B>|<B>-W</B>
[<B>-C</B>
<I>file</I>]
[<B>-d</B>]
[<B>-D</B>]
<I>page</I>
...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
<B>-c</B>
[<B>-C</B>
<I>file</I>]
[<B>-d</B>]
[<B>-D</B>]
<I>page</I>
...
<BR>
<B>man</B>
[<B>-?V</B>]
<A NAME="lbAD"> </A>
<H2>DESCRIPTION</H2>
<B>man</B>
is the system's manual pager.
Each
<I>page</I>
argument given to
<B>man</B>
is normally the name of a program, utility or function.
The
<I>manual page</I>
associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed.
A
<I>section</I>,
if provided, will direct
<B>man</B>
to look only in that
<I>section</I>
of the manual.
The default action is to search in all of the available
<I>sections</I>
following a pre-defined order ("1 1p 8 2 3 3p 4 5 6 7 9 0p tcl n l p o 1x 2x 3x 4x 5x 6x 7x 8x" by default, unless overridden by
the
<B>SECTION</B>
directive in
<I>/etc/man_db.conf</I>),
and to show only the first
<I>page</I>
found, even if
<I>page</I>
exists in several
<I>sections</I>.
<P>
The table below shows the
<I>section</I>
numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages they contain.
<P>
<TABLE class="listing">
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>1</TD><TD>
Executable programs or shell commands
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>2</TD><TD>
System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>3</TD><TD>
Library calls (functions within program libraries)
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>4</TD><TD>
Special files (usually found in <I>/dev/</I>)
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>5</TD><TD>
File formats and conventions eg <I>/etc/passwd</I>
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>6</TD><TD>
Games
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>7</TD><TD>
Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions),
e.g. <B><A HREF="./7~man">man</A></B>(7), <B><A HREF="http://HH?7+groff">groff</A></B>(7)
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>8</TD><TD>
System administration commands (usually only for root)
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>9</TD><TD>
Kernel routines [Non standard]
<BR></TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<P>
A manual
<I>page</I>
consists of several sections.
<P>
Conventional section names include
<B>NAME</B>,
<B>SYNOPSIS</B>,
<B>CONFIGURATION</B>,
<B>DESCRIPTION</B>,
<B>OPTIONS</B>,
<B>EXIT STATUS</B>,
<B>RETURN VALUE</B>,
<B>ERRORS</B>,
<B>ENVIRONMENT</B>,
<B>FILES</B>,
<B>VERSIONS</B>,
<B>CONFORMING TO</B>,
<B>NOTES</B>,
<B>BUGS</B>,
<B>EXAMPLE</B>,
<B>AUTHORS</B>,
and
<B>SEE ALSO</B>.
<P>
The following conventions apply to the
<B>SYNOPSIS</B>
section and can be used as a guide in other sections.
<P>
<TABLE class="listing">
<TR VALIGN=top><TD><B>bold text</B></TD><TD>
type exactly as shown.
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD><I>italic text</I></TD><TD>
replace with appropriate argument.
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>[<B>-abc</B>]</TD><TD>
any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD><B>-a</B>|<B>-b</B></TD><TD>
options delimited by | cannot be used together.
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD><I>argument</I> ...</TD><TD>
<I>argument</I> is repeatable.
<BR></TD></TR>
<TR VALIGN=top><TD>[<I>expression</I>] ...</TD><TD>
entire <I>expression</I> within [ ] is repeatable.
<BR></TD></TR>
</TABLE>
<P>
Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device.
For instance, man will usually not be able to render italics when running in
a terminal, and will typically use underlined or coloured text instead.
<P>
The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all
possible invocations.
In some cases it is advisable to illustrate several exclusive invocations
as is shown in the
<B>SYNOPSIS</B>
section of this manual page.
<A NAME="lbAE"> </A>
<H2>EXAMPLES</H2>
<DL COMPACT>
<DT><B>man</B><I> ls</I>
<DD>
Display the manual page for the
<I>item</I>
(program)
<I>ls</I>.
<DT><B>man </B><I>man</I>.<I>7<DD>
Display the manual page for macro package
man</I>
from section <I>7</I>.
<DT><B>man -a</B><I> intro</I>
<DD>
Display, in succession, all of the available
<I>intro</I>
manual pages contained within the manual.
It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.
<DT><B>man -t </B><I>alias </I>|<I> lpr -Pps<DD>
Format the manual page referenced by
</I>`<I>alias</I>',
usually a shell manual page, into the default
<B>troff</B>
or
<B>groff</B>
format and pipe it to the printer named
<I>ps</I>.
The default output for
<B>groff</B>
is usually PostScript.
<B>man --help</B>
should advise as to which processor is bound to the
<B>-t</B>
option.
<DT><B>man -l -T</B><I>dvi ./foo.1x.gz</I><B> > </B><I>./foo.1x.dvi</I>
<DD>
This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page
<I>./foo.1x.gz</I>
into a
<B>device independent (dvi)</B>
file.
The redirection is necessary as the
<B>-T</B>
flag causes output to be directed to
<B>stdout</B>
with no pager.
The output could be viewed with a program such as
<B>xdvi</B>
or further processed into PostScript using a program such as
<B>dvips.</B>
<DT><B>man -k</B><I> printf</I>
<DD>
Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword
<I>printf</I>
as regular expression.
Print out any matches.
Equivalent to
<B>apropos</B><I> printf</I><B>.</B>
<DT><B>man -f</B><I> smail</I>
<DD>
Lookup the manual pages referenced by
<I>smail</I>
and print out the short descriptions of any found.
Equivalent to
<B>whatis</B><I> smail</I><B>.</B>
</DL>
<A NAME="lbAF"> </A>
<H2>OVERVIEW</H2>
Many options are available to
<B>man</B>
in order to give as much flexibility as possible to the user.
Changes can be made to the search path, section order, output processor,
and other behaviours and operations detailed below.
<P>
If set, various environment variables are interrogated to determine
the operation of
<B>man</B>.
It is possible to set the `catch all' variable
$<B>MANOPT</B>
to any string in command line format with the exception that any spaces
used as part of an option's argument must be escaped (preceded by a
backslash).
<B>man</B>
will parse
$<B>MANOPT</B>
prior to parsing its own command line.
Those options requiring an argument will be overridden by the same options
found on the command line.
To reset all of the options set in
$<B>MANOPT</B>,
<B>-D</B>
can be specified as the initial command line option.
This will allow man to `forget' about the options specified in
$<B>MANOPT</B>
although they must still have been valid.
<P>
The manual pager utilities packaged as
<B>man-db</B>
make extensive use of
<B>index</B>
database caches.
These caches contain information such as where each manual page can be
found on the filesystem and what its
<I>whatis</I>
(short one line description of the man page) contains, and allow
<B>man</B>
to run faster than if it had to search the filesystem each time to find the
appropriate manual page.
If requested using the
<B>-u</B>
option,
<B>man</B>
will ensure that the caches remain consistent, which can obviate the
need to manually run software to update traditional
<I>whatis</I>
text databases.
<P>
If
<B>man</B>
cannot find a
<B>mandb</B>
initiated
<B>index</B>
database for a particular manual page hierarchy, it will still search for
the requested manual pages, although file globbing will be necessary to
search within that hierarchy.
If
<B>whatis</B>
or
<B>apropos</B>
fails to find an
<B>index</B>
it will try to extract information from a traditional
<I>whatis</I>
database instead.
<P>
These utilities support compressed source nroff files having, by default, the
extensions of
<B>.Z</B>, <B>.z</B> and <B>.gz</B>.
It is possible to deal with any compression extension, but this information
must be known at compile time.
Also, by default, any cat pages produced are compressed using
<B>gzip</B>.
Each `global' manual page hierarchy such as
<I>/usr/share/man</I>
or
<I>/usr/X11R6/man</I>
may have any directory as its cat page hierarchy.
Traditionally the cat pages are stored under the same hierarchy as the man
pages, but for reasons such as those specified in the
<B>File Hierarchy Standard (FHS)</B>,
it may be better to store them elsewhere.
For details on how to do this, please read
<B><A HREF="./5~manpath">manpath</A></B>(5).
For details on why to do this, read the standard.
<P>
International support is available with this package.
Native language manual pages are accessible (if available on your system)
via use of
<I>locale</I>
functions.
To activate such support, it is necessary to set either
$<B>LC_MESSAGES</B>,
$<B>LANG</B>
or another system dependent environment variable to your language locale,
usually specified in the
<B>POSIX 1003.1</B>
based format:
<P>
<<I>language</I>>[<B>_</B><<I>territory</I>>[<B>.</B><<I>character-set</I>>[<B>,</B><<I>version</I>>]]]
<P>
If the desired page is available in your
<I>locale</I>,
it will be displayed in lieu of the standard
(usually American English) page.
<P>
Support for international message catalogues is also featured in this
package and can be activated in the same way, again if available.
If you find that the manual pages and message catalogues supplied with this
package are not available in your native language and you would like to
supply them, please contact the maintainer who will be coordinating such
activity.
<P>
For information regarding other features and extensions available with this
manual pager, please read the documents supplied with the package.
<A NAME="lbAG"> </A>
<H2>DEFAULTS</H2>
<B>man</B>
will search for the desired manual pages within the
<I>index</I>
database caches. If the
<B>-u</B>
option is given, a cache consistency check is performed to ensure the
databases accurately reflect the filesystem.
If this option is always given, it is not generally necessary to run
<B>mandb</B>
after the caches are initially created, unless a cache becomes corrupt.
However, the cache consistency check can be slow on systems with many
manual pages installed, so it is not performed by default, and system
administrators may wish to run
<B>mandb</B>
every week or so to keep the database caches fresh.
To forestall problems caused by outdated caches,
<B>man</B>
will fall back to file globbing if a cache lookup fails, just as it would
if no cache was present.
<P>
Once a manual page has been located, a check is performed to find out if a
relative preformatted `cat' file already exists and is newer than the nroff
file.
If it does and is, this preformatted file is (usually) decompressed and then
displayed, via use of a pager.
The pager can be specified in a number of ways, or else will fall back to a
default is used (see option
<B>-P</B>
for details).
If no cat is found or is older than the nroff file, the nroff is filtered
through various programs and is shown immediately.
<P>
If a cat file can be produced (a relative cat directory exists and has
appropriate permissions),
<B>man</B>
will compress and store the cat file in the background.
<P>
The filters are deciphered by a number of means.
Firstly, the command line option
<B>-p</B>
or the environment variable
$<B>MANROFFSEQ</B>
is interrogated.
If
<B>-p</B>
was not used and the environment variable was not set, the initial line of
the nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string.
To contain a valid preprocessor string, the first line must resemble
<P>
<B>'\</B>
<<B>string</B>>
<P>
where
<B>string</B>
can be any combination of letters described by option
<B>-p</B>
below.
<P>
If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default set
is used.
<P>
A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary
formatter
(<B>nroff</B>
or
[<B>tg</B>]<B>roff</B>
with
<B>-t</B>)
and executed.
Alternatively, if an executable program
<I>mandb_nfmt</I>
(or
<I>mandb_tfmt</I>
with
<B>-t</B>)
exists in the man tree root, it is executed instead.
It gets passed the manual source file, the preprocessor string, and
optionally the device specified with
<B>-T</B> or <B>-E</B>
as arguments.
<A NAME="lbAH"> </A>
<H2>OPTIONS</H2>
Non argument options that are duplicated either on the command line, in
$<B>MANOPT</B>,
or both, are not harmful.
For options that require an argument, each duplication will override the
previous argument value.
<A NAME="lbAI"> </A>
<H3>General options</H3>
<DL COMPACT>
<DT><B>-C </B><I>file</I><B></B>, <B>--config-file=</B><I>file</I>
<DD>
Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
<I>~/.manpath</I>.
<DT><B>-d</B>, <B>--debug</B>
<DD>
Print debugging information.
<DT><B>-D</B>, <B>--default</B>
<DD>
This option is normally issued as the very first option and resets
<B>man's</B>
behaviour to its default.
Its use is to reset those options that may have been set in
$<B>MANOPT</B>.
Any options that follow
<B>-D</B>
will have their usual effect.
<DT><B>--warnings</B>[=<I>warnings/</I>]<DD>
Enable warnings from
<I>groff</I>.
This may be used to perform sanity checks on the source text of manual
pages.
<I>warnings</I>
is a comma-separated list of warning names; if it is not supplied, the
default is "mac".
See the lqWarningsrq node in
<B>info groff</B>
for a list of available warning names.
</DL>
<A NAME="lbAJ"> </A>
<H3>Main modes of operation</H3>
<DL COMPACT>
<DT><B>-f</B>, <B>--whatis</B>
<DD>
Equivalent to
<B>whatis</B>.
Display a short description from the manual page, if available.
See
<B><A HREF="./1~whatis">whatis</A></B>(1)
for details.
<DT><B>-k</B>, <B>--apropos</B>
<DD>
Equivalent to
<B>apropos</B>.
Search the short manual page descriptions for keywords and display any
matches.
See
<B><A HREF="./1~apropos">apropos</A></B>(1)
for details.
<DT><B>-K</B>, <B>--global-apropos</B>
<DD>
Search for text in all manual pages.
This is a brute-force search, and is likely to take some time; if you can,
you should specify a section to reduce the number of pages that need to be
searched.
Search terms may be simple strings (the default), or regular expressions if
the
<B>--regex</B>
option is used.
<DT><DD>
Note that this searches the
<I>sources</I>
of the manual pages, not the rendered text, and so may include false
positives due to things like comments in source files.
Searching the rendered text would be much slower.
<DT><B>-l</B>, <B>--local-file</B>
<DD>
Activate `local' mode.
Format and display local manual files instead of searching through the
system's manual collection.
Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source file in the
correct format.
No cat file is produced.
If '-' is listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from stdin.
When this option is not used, and man fails to find the page required,
before displaying the error message, it attempts to act as if this
option was supplied, using the name as a filename and looking for an
exact match.
<DT><B>-w</B>, <B>--where</B>, <B>--path</B>, <B>--location</B>
<DD>
Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the location(s) of
the source nroff files that would be formatted.
<DT><B>-W</B>, <B>--where-cat</B>, <B>--location-cat</B>
<DD>
Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the location(s) of
the cat files that would be displayed.
If -w and -W are both specified, print both separated by a space.
<DT><B>-c</B>, <B>--catman</B>
<DD>
This option is not for general use and should only be used by the
<B>catman</B>
program.
<DT><B>-R </B><I>encoding</I>, <I></I><B>--recode</B>=<I>encoding</I>
<DD>
Instead of formatting the manual page in the usual way, output its source
converted to the specified
<I>encoding</I>.
If you already know the encoding of the source file, you can also use
<B><A HREF="./1~manconv">manconv</A></B>(1)
directly.
However, this option allows you to convert several manual pages to a single
encoding without having to explicitly state the encoding of each, provided
that they were already installed in a structure similar to a manual page
hierarchy.
</DL>
<A NAME="lbAK"> </A>
<H3>Finding manual pages</H3>
<DL COMPACT>
<DT><B>-L </B><I>locale</I><B></B>, <B>--locale=</B><I>locale</I>
<DD>
<B>man</B>
will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C function
<B><A HREF="./3~setlocale">setlocale</A></B>(3)
which interrogates various environment variables, possibly including
$<B>LC_MESSAGES</B>
and
$<B>LANG</B>.
To temporarily override the determined value, use this option to supply a
<I>locale</I>
string directly to
<B>man</B>.
Note that it will not take effect until the search for pages actually
begins.
Output such as the help message will always be displayed in the initially
determined locale.
</DL>
<P>
<B>-m</B>
<I>system</I>[,...],
<B>--systems=</B><I>system</I>[,...]
<DL COMPACT><DT><DD>
If this system has access to other operating system's manual pages, they can
be accessed using this option.
To search for a manual page from NewOS's manual page collection,
use the option
<B>-m</B>
<B>NewOS</B>.
<P>
The
<I>system</I>
specified can be a combination of comma delimited operating system names.
To include a search of the native operating system's manual pages,
include the system name
<B>man</B>
in the argument string.
This option will override the
$<B>SYSTEM</B>
environment variable.
</DL>
<DL COMPACT>
<DT><B>-M </B><I>path</I><B></B>, <B>--manpath=</B><I>path</I>
<DD>
Specify an alternate manpath to use.
By default,
<B>man</B>
uses
<B>manpath</B>
derived code to determine the path to search.
This option overrides the
$<B>MANPATH</B>