NAME
man.conf
—
configuration file for man
DESCRIPTION
This is the configuration file for the man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8) utilities. Its presence, and all directives, are optional.
This file is an ASCII text file. Leading whitespace on lines, lines starting with ‘#’, and blank lines are ignored. Words are separated by whitespace. The first word on each line is the name of a configuration directive.
The following directives are supported:
manpath
path- Override the default search path for
man(1),
apropos(1), and
makewhatis(8). It can be used multiple times to specify
multiple paths, with the order determining the manual page search order.
Each path is a tree containing subdirectories whose names consist of the strings ‘man’ and/or ‘cat’ followed by the names of sections, usually single digits. The former are supposed to contain unformatted manual pages in mdoc(7) and/or man(7) format; file names should end with the name of the section preceded by a dot. The latter should contain preformatted manual pages; file names should end with ‘
.0
’.Creating a mandoc.db(5) database with makewhatis(8) in each directory configured with
manpath
is recommended and necessary for apropos(1) to work, but not strictly required for man(1). output
option [value]- Configure the default value of an output option. These directives are
overridden by the
-O
command line options of the same names. For details, see the mandoc(1) manual.option value used by -T
purpose fragment
none html
print only body includes
string html
path to header files indent
integer ascii
,utf8
left margin man
string html
path for links paper
string ps
,pdf
paper size style
string html
CSS file width
integer ascii
,utf8
right margin _whatdb
path/whatis.db
- This directive provides the same functionality as
manpath
, but using a historic and misleading syntax. It is kept for backward compatibility for now, but will eventually be removed.
FILES
/etc/man.conf
EXAMPLES
The following configuration file reproduces the defaults:
installing it is equivalent to not having a man.conf
file at all.
manpath /usr/share/man manpath /usr/X11R6/man manpath /usr/local/man
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
A relatively complicated man.conf
file
format first appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno. For
OpenBSD 5.8, it was redesigned from scratch, aiming
for simplicity.
AUTHORS
Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>