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MAN(1) Manual pager utils MAN(1)
NAME
man - an interface to the system reference manuals
SYNOPSIS
man [man options] [[section] page ...] ...
man -k [apropos options] regexp ...
man -K [man options] [section] term ...
man -f [whatis options] page ...
man -l [man options] file ...
man -w|-W [man options] page ...
DESCRIPTION
man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of
a program, utility or function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments
is then found and displayed. A section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that
section of the manual. The default action is to search in all of the available sections
following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS), and to show only the first page found, even
if page exists in several sections.
The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages
they contain.
1 Executable programs or shell commands
2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3 Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
5 File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7),
man-pages(7)
8 System administration commands (usually only for root)
9 Kernel routines [Non standard]
A manual page consists of several sections.
Conventional section names include NAME, SYNOPSIS, CONFIGURATION, DESCRIPTION, OPTIONS,
EXIT STATUS, RETURN VALUE, ERRORS, ENVIRONMENT, FILES, VERSIONS, CONFORMING TO, NOTES,
BUGS, EXAMPLE, AUTHORS, and SEE ALSO.
The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section and can be used as a guide in
other sections.
bold text type exactly as shown.
italic text replace with appropriate argument.
[-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
-a|-b options delimited by | cannot be used together.
argument ... argument is repeatable.
[expression] ... entire expression within [ ] is repeatable.
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 under-
lined or coloured text instead.
The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all possible invoca-
tions. In some cases it is advisable to illustrate several exclusive invocations as is
shown in the SYNOPSIS section of this manual page.
EXAMPLES
man ls
Display the manual page for the item (program) ls.
man man.7
Display the manual page for macro package man from section 7. (This is an alternative
spelling of "man 7 man".)
man 'man(7)'
Display the manual page for macro package man from section 7. (This is another alter-
native spelling of "man 7 man". It may be more convenient when copying and pasting
cross-references to manual pages. Note that the parentheses must normally be quoted
to protect them from the shell.)
man -a intro
Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the
manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.
man -t bash | lpr -Pps
Format the manual page for bash into the default troff or groff format and pipe it to
the printer named ps. The default output for groff is usually PostScript. man --help
should advise as to which processor is bound to the -t option.
man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi
This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page ./foo.1x.gz into
a device independent (dvi) file. The redirection is necessary as the -T flag causes
output to be directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a pro-
gram such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a program such as dvips.
man -k printf
Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf as regular
expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to apropos printf.
man -f smail
Lookup the manual pages referenced by smail and print out the short descriptions of
any found. Equivalent to whatis smail.
OVERVIEW
Many options are available to man 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.
If set, various environment variables are interrogated to determine the operation of man.
It is possible to set the "catch-all" variable $MANOPT to any string in command line for-
mat, with the exception that any spaces used as part of an option's argument must be es-
caped (preceded by a backslash). man will parse $MANOPT 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 $MANOPT, -D can be specified as the
initial command line option. This will allow man to "forget" about the options specified
in $MANOPT, although they must still have been valid.
Manual pages are normally stored in nroff(1) format under a directory such as
/usr/share/man. In some installations, there may also be preformatted cat pages to im-
prove performance. See manpath(5) for details of where these files are stored.
This package supports manual pages in multiple languages, controlled by your locale. If
your system did not set this up for you automatically, then you may need to set $LC_MES-
SAGES, $LANG, or another system-dependent environment variable to indicate your preferred
locale, usually specified in the POSIX format:
<language>[_<territory>[.<character-set>[,<version>]]]
If the desired page is available in your locale, it will be displayed in lieu of the stan-
dard (usually American English) page.
If you find that the translations supplied with this package are not available in your na-
tive language and you would like to supply them, please contact the maintainer who will be
coordinating such activity.
Individual manual pages are normally written and maintained by the maintainers of the pro-
gram, function, or other topic that they document, and are not included with this package.
If you find that a manual page is missing or inadequate, please report that to the main-
tainers of the package in question.
For information regarding other features and extensions available with this manual pager,
please read the documents supplied with the package.
DEFAULTS
The order of sections to search may be overridden by the environment variable $MANSECT or
by the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config. By default it is as follows:
1 n l 8 3 0 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 3am 5 4 9 6 7
The formatted manual page is displayed using a pager. This can be specified in a number
of ways, or else will fall back to a default (see option -P for details).
The filters are deciphered by a number of means. Firstly, the command line option -p or
the environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is interrogated. If -p was not used and the environ-
ment 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
'\" <string>
where string can be any combination of letters described by option -p below.
If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default set is used.
A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary formatter (nroff or
[tg]roff with -t) and executed. Alternatively, if an executable program mandb_nfmt (or
mandb_tfmt with -t) 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
-T or -E as arguments.
OPTIONS
Non-argument options that are duplicated either on the command line, in $MANOPT, or both,
are not harmful. For options that require an argument, each duplication will override the
previous argument value.
General options
-C file, --config-file=file
Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.
-d, --debug
Print debugging information.
-D, --default
This option is normally issued as the very first option and resets man's behaviour
to its default. Its use is to reset those options that may have been set in
$MANOPT. Any options that follow -D will have their usual effect.
--warnings[=warnings]
Enable warnings from groff. This may be used to perform sanity checks on the
source text of manual pages. warnings is a comma-separated list of warning names;
if it is not supplied, the default is "mac". See the "Warnings" node in info groff
for a list of available warning names.
Main modes of operation
-f, --whatis
Equivalent to whatis. Display a short description from the manual page, if avail-
able. See whatis(1) for details.
-k, --apropos
Equivalent to apropos. Search the short manual page descriptions for keywords and
display any matches. See apropos(1) for details.
-K, --global-apropos
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 --regex option is used.
Note that this searches the sources 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.
-l, --local-file
Activate "local" mode. Format and display local manual files instead of searching
through the system's manual collection. Each manual page argument will be inter-
preted 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.
-w, --where, --path, --location
Don't actually display the manual page, but do print the location of the source
nroff file that would be formatted. If the -a option is also used, then print the
locations of all source files that match the search criteria.
-W, --where-cat, --location-cat
Don't actually display the manual page, but do print the location of the preformat-
ted cat file that would be displayed. If the -a option is also used, then print
the locations of all preformatted cat files that match the search criteria.
If -w and -W are both used, then print both source file and cat file separated by a
space. If all of -w, -W, and -a are used, then do this for each possible match.
-c, --catman
This option is not for general use and should only be used by the catman program.
-R encoding, --recode=encoding
Instead of formatting the manual page in the usual way, output its source converted
to the specified encoding. If you already know the encoding of the source file,
you can also use manconv(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.
Consider using man-recode(1) instead for converting multiple manual pages, since it
has an interface designed for bulk conversion and so can be much faster.
Finding manual pages
-L locale, --locale=locale
man will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C function setlo-
cale(3) which interrogates various environment variables, possibly including
$LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To temporarily override the determined value, use this op-
tion to supply a locale string directly to man. 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.
-m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
If this system has access to other operating systems' manual pages, they can be ac-
cessed using this option. To search for a manual page from NewOS's manual page
collection, use the option -m NewOS.
The system 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 man in the argument string. This option will override the $SYSTEM
environment variable.
-M path, --manpath=path
Specify an alternate manpath to use. By default, man uses manpath derived code to
determine the path to search. This option overrides the $MANPATH environment vari-
able and causes option -m to be ignored.
A path specified as a manpath must be the root of a manual page hierarchy struc-
tured into sections as described in the man-db manual (under "The manual page sys-
tem"). To view manual pages outside such hierarchies, see the -l option.
-S list, -s list, --sections=list
The given list is a colon- or comma-separated list of sections, used to determine
which manual sections to search and in what order. This option overrides the $MAN-
SECT environment variable. (The -s spelling is for compatibility with System V.)
-e sub-extension, --extension=sub-extension
Some systems incorporate large packages of manual pages, such as those that accom-
pany the Tcl package, into the main manual page hierarchy. To get around the prob-
lem of having two manual pages with the same name such as exit(3), the Tcl pages
were usually all assigned to section l. As this is unfortunate, it is now possible
to put the pages in the correct section, and to assign a specific "extension" to
them, in this case, exit(3tcl). Under normal operation, man will display exit(3)
in preference to exit(3tcl). To negotiate this situation and to avoid having to
know which section the page you require resides in, it is now possible to give man
a sub-extension string indicating which package the page must belong to. Using the
above example, supplying the option -e tcl to man will restrict the search to pages
having an extension of *tcl.
-i, --ignore-case
Ignore case when searching for manual pages. This is the default.
-I, --match-case
Search for manual pages case-sensitively.
--regex
Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions matching
each page argument as a regular expression, as with apropos(1). Since there is
usually no reasonable way to pick a "best" page when searching for a regular ex-
pression, this option implies -a.
--wildcard
Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions matching
each page argument using shell-style wildcards, as with apropos(1) --wildcard. The
page argument must match the entire name or description, or match on word bound-
aries in the description. Since there is usually no reasonable way to pick a
"best" page when searching for a wildcard, this option implies -a.
--names-only
If the --regex or --wildcard option is used, match only page names, not page de-
scriptions, as with whatis(1). Otherwise, no effect.
-a, --all
By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds.
Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match
the search criteria.
-u, --update
This option causes man to update its database caches of installed manual pages.
This is only needed in rare situations, and it is normally better to run mandb(8)
instead.
--no-subpages
By default, man will try to interpret pairs of manual page names given on the com-
mand line as equivalent to a single manual page name containing a hyphen or an un-
derscore. This supports the common pattern of programs that implement a number of
subcommands, allowing them to provide manual pages for each that can be accessed
using similar syntax as would be used to invoke the subcommands themselves. For
example:
$ man -aw git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git-diff.1.gz
To disable this behaviour, use the --no-subpages option.
$ man -aw --no-subpages git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/Git.3pm.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/diff.1.gz
Controlling formatted output
-P pager, --pager=pager
Specify which output pager to use. By default, man uses pager, falling back to cat
if pager is not found or is not executable. This option overrides the $MANPAGER
environment variable, which in turn overrides the $PAGER environment variable. It
is not used in conjunction with -f or -k.
The value may be a simple command name or a command with arguments, and may use
shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes). It may not use pipes
to connect multiple commands; if you need that, use a wrapper script, which may
take the file to display either as an argument or on standard input.
-r prompt, --prompt=prompt
If a recent version of less is used as the pager, man will attempt to set its
prompt and some sensible options. The default prompt looks like
Manual page name(sec) line x
where name denotes the manual page name, sec denotes the section it was found under
and x the current line number. This is achieved by using the $LESS environment
variable.
Supplying -r with a string will override this default. The string may contain the
text $MAN_PN which will be expanded to the name of the current manual page and its
section name surrounded by "(" and ")". The string used to produce the default
could be expressed as
\ Manual\ page\ \$MAN_PN\ ?ltline\ %lt?L/%L.:
byte\ %bB?s/%s..?\ (END):?pB\ %pB\\%..
(press h for help or q to quit)
It is broken into three lines here for the sake of readability only. For its mean-
ing see the less(1) manual page. The prompt string is first evaluated by the
shell. All double quotes, back-quotes and backslashes in the prompt must be es-
caped by a preceding backslash. The prompt string may end in an escaped $ which
may be followed by further options for less. By default man sets the -ix8 options.
The $MANLESS environment variable described below may be used to set a default
prompt string if none is supplied on the command line.
-7, --ascii
When viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7 bit terminal or terminal emulator,
some characters may not display correctly when using the latin1(7) device descrip-
tion with GNU nroff. This option allows pure ascii manual pages to be displayed in
ascii with the latin1 device. It will not translate any latin1 text. The follow-
ing table shows the translations performed: some parts of it may only be displayed
properly when using GNU nroff's latin1(7) device.
Description Octal latin1 ascii
---------------------------------------------
continuation hyphen 255 - -
bullet (middle dot) 267 o o
acute accent 264 ' '
multiplication sign 327 x x
If the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal may be set up for latin1
characters and this option is not necessary. If the latin1 and ascii columns are
identical, you are reading this page using this option or man did not format this
page using the latin1 device description. If the latin1 column is missing or cor-
rupt, you may need to view manual pages with this option.
This option is ignored when using options -t, -H, -T, or -Z and may be useless for
nroff other than GNU's.
-E encoding, --encoding=encoding
Generate output for a character encoding other than the default. For backward com-
patibility, encoding may be an nroff device such as ascii, latin1, or utf8 as well
as a true character encoding such as UTF-8.
--no-hyphenation, --nh
Normally, nroff will automatically hyphenate text at line breaks even in words that
do not contain hyphens, if it is necessary to do so to lay out words on a line
without excessive spacing. This option disables automatic hyphenation, so words
will only be hyphenated if they already contain hyphens.
If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent nroff from hyphenating
a word at an inappropriate point, do not use this option, but consult the nroff
documentation instead; for instance, you can put "\%" inside a word to indicate
that it may be hyphenated at that point, or put "\%" at the start of a word to pre-
vent it from being hyphenated.
--no-justification, --nj
Normally, nroff will automatically justify text to both margins. This option dis-
ables full justification, leaving justified only to the left margin, sometimes
called "ragged-right" text.
If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent nroff from justifying
certain paragraphs, do not use this option, but consult the nroff documentation in-
stead; for instance, you can use the ".na", ".nf", ".fi", and ".ad" requests to
temporarily disable adjusting and filling.
-p string, --preprocessor=string
Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff/groff. Not all
installations will have a full set of preprocessors. Some of the preprocessors and
the letters used to designate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind
(v), refer (r). This option overrides the $MANROFFSEQ environment variable. zsoe-
lim is always run as the very first preprocessor.
-t, --troff
Use groff -mandoc to format the manual page to stdout. This option is not required
in conjunction with -H, -T, or -Z.
-T[device], --troff-device[=device]
This option is used to change groff (or possibly troff's) output to be suitable for
a device other than the default. It implies -t. Examples (provided with
Groff-1.17) include dvi, latin1, ps, utf8, X75 and X100.
-H[browser], --html[=browser]
This option will cause groff to produce HTML output, and will display that output
in a web browser. The choice of browser is determined by the optional browser ar-
gument if one is provided, by the $BROWSER environment variable, or by a compile-
time default if that is unset (usually lynx). This option implies -t, and will
only work with GNU troff.
-X[dpi], --gxditview[=dpi]
This option displays the output of groff in a graphical window using the gxditview
program. The dpi (dots per inch) may be 75, 75-12, 100, or 100-12, defaulting to
75; the -12 variants use a 12-point base font. This option implies -T with the
X75, X75-12, X100, or X100-12 device respectively.
-Z, --ditroff
groff will run troff and then use an appropriate post-processor to produce output
suitable for the chosen device. If groff -mandoc is groff, this option is passed
to groff and will suppress the use of a post-processor. It implies -t.
Getting help
-?, --help
Print a help message and exit.
--usage
Print a short usage message and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information.
EXIT STATUS
0 Successful program execution.
1 Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
2 Operational error.
3 A child process returned a non-zero exit status.
16 At least one of the pages/files/keywords didn't exist or wasn't matched.
ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH
If $MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.
See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default behaviour and details of
how this environment variable is handled.
MANROFFOPT
Every time man invokes the formatter (nroff, troff, or groff), it adds the contents
of $MANROFFOPT to the formatter's command line.
MANROFFSEQ
If $MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of preprocessors to
pass each manual page through. The default preprocessor list is system dependent.
MANSECT
If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections and it is used
to determine which manual sections to search and in what order. The default is "1
n l 8 3 0 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 3am 5 4 9 6 7", unless overridden by the SECTION di-
rective in /etc/manpath.config.
MANPAGER, PAGER
If $MANPAGER or $PAGER is set ($MANPAGER is used in preference), its value is used
as the name of the program used to display the manual page. By default, pager is
used, falling back to cat if pager is not found or is not executable.
The value may be a simple command name or a command with arguments, and may use
shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes). It may not use pipes
to connect multiple commands; if you need that, use a wrapper script, which may
take the file to display either as an argument or on standard input.
MANLESS
If $MANLESS is set, its value will be used as the default prompt string for the
less pager, as if it had been passed using the -r option (so any occurrences of the
text $MAN_PN will be expanded in the same way). For example, if you want to set
the prompt string unconditionally to "my prompt string", set $MANLESS to
'-Psmy prompt string'. Using the -r option overrides this environment variable.
BROWSER
If $BROWSER is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of commands, each of which
in turn is used to try to start a web browser for man --html. In each command, %s
is replaced by a filename containing the HTML output from groff, %% is replaced by
a single percent sign (%), and %c is replaced by a colon (:).
SYSTEM If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had been specified as the
argument to the -m option.
MANOPT If $MANOPT is set, it will be parsed prior to man's command line and is expected to
be in a similar format. As all of the other man specific environment variables can
be expressed as command line options, and are thus candidates for being included in
$MANOPT it is expected that they will become obsolete. N.B. All spaces that
should be interpreted as part of an option's argument must be escaped.
MANWIDTH
If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the line length for which manual pages
should be formatted. If it is not set, manual pages will be formatted with a line
length appropriate to the current terminal (using the value of $COLUMNS, and
ioctl(2) if available, or falling back to 80 characters if neither is available).
Cat pages will only be saved when the default formatting can be used, that is when
the terminal line length is between 66 and 80 characters.
MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING
Normally, when output is not being directed to a terminal (such as to a file or a
pipe), formatting characters are discarded to make it easier to read the result
without special tools. However, if $MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING is set to any non-empty
value, these formatting characters are retained. This may be useful for wrappers
around man that can interpret formatting characters.
MAN_KEEP_STDERR
Normally, when output is being directed to a terminal (usually to a pager), any er-
ror output from the command used to produce formatted versions of manual pages is
discarded to avoid interfering with the pager's display. Programs such as groff
often produce relatively minor error messages about typographical problems such as
poor alignment, which are unsightly and generally confusing when displayed along
with the manual page. However, some users want to see them anyway, so, if
$MAN_KEEP_STDERR is set to any non-empty value, error output will be displayed as
usual.
MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP
On Linux, man normally confines subprocesses that handle untrusted data using a
seccomp(2) sandbox. This makes it safer to run complex parsing code over arbitrary
manual pages. If this goes wrong for some reason unrelated to the content of the
page being displayed, you can set $MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP to any non-empty value to
disable the sandbox.
PIPELINE_DEBUG
If the $PIPELINE_DEBUG environment variable is set to "1", then man will print de-
bugging messages to standard error describing each subprocess it runs.
LANG, LC_MESSAGES
Depending on system and implementation, either or both of $LANG and $LC_MESSAGES
will be interrogated for the current message locale. man will display its messages
in that locale (if available). See setlocale(3) for precise details.
FILES
/etc/manpath.config
man-db configuration file.
/usr/share/man
A global manual page hierarchy.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), groff(1), less(1), manpath(1), nroff(1), troff(1), whatis(1), zsoelim(1), man-
path(5), man(7), catman(8), mandb(8)
Documentation for some packages may be available in other formats, such as info(1) or
HTML.
HISTORY
1990, 1991 - Originally written by John W. Eaton (jwe AT che.edu).
Dec 23 1992: Rik Faith (faith AT cs.edu) applied bug fixes supplied by Willem Kasdorp
(wkasdo AT nikhefk.nl).
30th April 1994 - 23rd February 2000: Wilf. (G.Wilford AT ee.uk) has been develop-
ing and maintaining this package with the help of a few dedicated people.
30th October 1996 - 30th March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco <fpolacco AT debian.org> maintained and
enhanced this package for the Debian project, with the help of all the community.
31st March 2001 - present day: Colin Watson <cjwatson AT debian.org> is now developing and
maintaining man-db.
BUGS
https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db/-/issues
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db
2.10.2 2022-03-17 MAN(1)
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