NAME

Man - format and display the on-line manual pages

SYNOPSIS
Man [-acdfFhkKtwW] [--path] [-m system] [-p string] [-C config_file] [-M
pathlist] [-P pager] [-B
browser] [-H htmlpager] [-S section_list] [section] name ...

DESCRIPTION
Man formats and displays the on-line manual pages. If you specify section,
man only looks in that
section of the manual. Name is normally the name of the manual page, which
is typically the name of
a command, function, or file. However, if name contains a slash (/) then
man interprets it as a file
specification, so that you can do man ./foo.5 or even man /cd/foo/bar.1.gz.

See below for a description of where man looks for the manual page files.

OPTIONS
-Cconfig_file
Specify the configuration file to use; the default is
/etc/man.config. (See man.config(5).)

-Mpath
Specify the list of directories to search for man pages.
Separate the directories with
colons. An empty list is the same as not specifying -M at all. See
SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL
PAGES.

-Ppager
Specify which pager to use. This option overrides the MANPAGER
environment variable, which in
turn overrides the PAGER variable. By default, man uses
/usr/bin/less -is.

-B Specify which browser to use on HTML files. This option overrides

the BROWSER environment
variable. By default, man uses /usr/bin/lynx,

-H Specify a command that renders HTML files as text. This option

overrides the HTMLPAGER envi-
ronment variable. By default, man uses /usr/bin/lynx-dump,

-Ssection_list
List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search. This
option overrides the MAN-
SECT environment variable.

-a By default, man will exit after displaying the first manual page it
finds. Using this option
forces man to display all the manual pages that match name, not just
the first.

-c Reformat the source man page, even when an up-to-date cat page
exists. This can be meaningful
if the cat page was formatted for a screen with a different number
of columns, or if the pre-
 formatted page is corrupted.

-d Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging
information.

-D Both display and print debugging info.

-f Equivalent to whatis.

-F or --preformat
Format only - do not display.

-h Print a help message and exit.

-k Equivalent to apropos.

-K Search for the specified string in *all* man pages. Warning: this is
probably very slow! It
helps to specify a section. (Just to give a rough idea, on my
machine this takes about a
minute per 500 man pages.)

-m system
Specify an alternate set of man pages to search based on the system
name given.

-p string
Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff.
Not all installations
will have a full set of preprocessors. Some of the preprocessors and
the letters used to des-
ignate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind (v),
refer (r). This option
overrides the MANROFFSEQ environment variable.

-t Use /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc to format the manual page, passing

the output to stdout. The
default output format of /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc is Postscript,
refer to the manual page
of /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc for ways to pick an alternate format.

Depending on the selected format and the availability of printing devices,

the output may need to be
passed through some filter or another before being printed.

-w or --path
Don't actually display the man pages, but do print the location(s) of
the files that would be
formatted or displayed. If no argument is given: display (on
stdout) the list of directories
that is searched by man for man pages. If manpath is a link to man,
then "manpath" is equiva-
lent to "man --path".

-W Like -w, but print file names one per line, without additional
information. This is useful in
shell commands like man -aW man | xargs ls -l

CAT PAGES
 Man will try to save the formatted man pages, in order to save formatting
time the next time these
pages are needed. Traditionally, formatted versions of pages in DIR/manX
are saved in DIR/catX, but
other mappings from man dir to cat dir can be specified in /etc/man.config.
No cat pages are saved
when the required cat directory does not exist. No cat pages are saved when
they are formatted for a
line length different from 80. No cat pages are saved when man.config
contains the line NOCACHE.

It is possible to make man suid to a user man. Then, if a cat directory has
owner man and mode 0755
(only writable by man), and the cat files have owner man and mode 0644 or
0444 (only writable by man,
or not writable at all), no ordinary user can change the cat pages or put
other files in the cat
directory. If man is not made suid, then a cat directory should have mode
0777 if all users should be
able to leave cat pages there.

The option -c forces reformatting a page, even if a recent cat page exists.

HTML PAGES
Man will find HTML pages if they live in directories named as expected to be
".html", thus a valid
name for an HTML version of the ls(1) man page would be
/usr/share/man/htmlman1/ls.1.html.

SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES

man uses a sophisticated method of finding manual page files, based on
the invocation options and
environment variables, the /etc/man.config configuration file, and some
built in conventions and
heuristics.

First of all, when the name argument to man contains a slash (/), man
assumes it is a file specifica-
tion itself, and there is no searching involved.

But in the normal case where name doesn't contain a slash, man searches a
variety of directories for
a file that could be a manual page for the topic named.

If you specify the -M pathlist option, pathlist is a colon-separated list of

the directories that man
searches.

If you don't specify -M but set the MANPATH environment variable, the value
of that variable is the
list of the directories that man searches.

If you don't specify an explicit path list with -M or MANPATH, man

develops its own path list based
on the contents of the configuration file /etc/man.config. The MANPATH
statements in the configura-
tion file identify particular directories to include in the search path.

Furthermore, the MANPATH_MAP statements add to the search path depending on

your command search path
(i.e. your PATH environment variable). For each directory that may be in
the command search path, a
MANPATH_MAP statement specifies a directory that should be added to the
search path for manual page
files. man looks at the PATH variable and adds the corresponding
directories to the manual page file
search path. Thus, with the proper use of MANPATH_MAP, when you issue the
command man xyz, you get a
manual page for the program that would run if you issued the command xyz.

In addition, for each directory in the command search path (we'll call it a
"command directory") for
which you do not have a MANPATH_MAP statement, man automatically looks
for a manual page directory
"nearby" namely as a subdirectory in the command directory itself or in the
parent directory of the
command directory.

You can disable the automatic "nearby" searches by including a NOAUTOPATH

statement in /etc/man.con-
fig.

In each directory in the search path as described above, man searches for a
file named topic.section,
with an optional suffix on the section number and possibly a compression
suffix. If it doesn't find
such a file, it then looks in any subdirectories named manN or catN where N
is the manual section
number. If the file is in a catN subdirectory, man assumes it is a
formatted manual page file (cat
page). Otherwise, man assumes it is unformatted. In either case, if the
filename has a known com-
pression suffix (like .gz), man assumes it is gzipped.

If you want to see where (or if) man would find the manual page for a
particular topic, use the
--path (-w) option.

ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH
If MANPATH is set, man uses it as the path to search for manual page
files. It overrides the
configuration file and the automatic search path, but is
overridden by the -M invocation
option. See SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES.

MANPL If MANPL is set, its value is used as the display page length.
Otherwise, the entire man page
will occupy one (long) page.

MANROFFSEQ
If MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of
preprocessors run before run-
ning nroff or troff. By default, pages are passed through the tbl
preprocessor before nroff.

MANSECT
If MANSECT is set, its value is used to determine which manual
sections to search.

MANWIDTH
If MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the width manpages should
be displayed. Otherwise
the pages may be displayed over the whole width of your screen.

MANPAGER
If MANPAGER is set, its value is used as the name of the program to
use to display the man
page. If not, then PAGER is used. If that has no value either,
/usr/bin/less -is is used.

BROWSER
The name of a browser to use for displaying HTML manual
pages. If it is not set,
/usr/bin/lynx is used.

HTMLPAGER
The command to use for rendering HTML manual pages as text. If it is
not set, /usr/bin/lynx
-dump is used.

LANG If LANG is set, its value defines the name of the subdirectory
where man first looks for man
pages. Thus, the command 'LANG=dk man 1 foo' will cause man to look
for the foo man page in
.../dk/man1/foo.1, and if it cannot find such a file, then in
.../man1/foo.1, where ... is a
directory on the search path.

NLSPATH, LC_MESSAGES, LANG

The environment variables NLSPATH and LC_MESSAGES (or LANG when the
latter does not exist)
play a role in locating the message catalog. (But the English
messages are compiled in, and
for English no catalog is required.) Note that programs like col(1)
called by man also use
e.g. LC_CTYPE.

PATH PATH helps determine the search path for manual page files. See
SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES.

SYSTEM SYSTEM is used to get the default alternate system name (for use with
the -m option).

BUGS
The -t option only works if a troff-like program is installed.
If you see blinking \255 or <AD> instead of hyphens, put
'LESSCHARSET=latin1' in your environment.

TIPS
If you add the line

(global-set-key [(f1)] (lambda () (interactive) (manual-entry (current-

word))))

to your .emacs file, then hitting F1 will give you the man page for the
library call at the current
 cursor position.

To get a plain text version of a man page, without backspaces and

underscores, try

# man foo | col -b > foo.mantxt

AUTHOR
John W. Eaton was the original author of man. Zeyd M. Ben-Halim
released man 1.2, and Andries
Brouwer followed up with versions 1.3 thru 1.5p. Federico Lucifredi
<flucifredi@acm.org> is the cur-
rent maintainer.

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), whatis(1), less(1), groff(1), man.config(5).

September 19, 2005 man(1)

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