MAN(1) | General Commands Manual | MAN(1) |
man
— display
manual pages
man |
[-acfhklw ] [-C
file] [-M
path] [-m
path] [-S
subsection] [[-s ]
section] name ... |
The man
utility displays the manual pages
entitled name. Pages may be selected according to a
specific category (section) or machine architecture
(subsection).
The options are as follows:
-a
-C
file-c
When using -c
, most terminal devices
are unable to show the markup. To print the output of
man
to the terminal with markup but without
using a pager, pipe it to
ul(1). To remove the markup,
pipe the output to col(1)
-b
instead.
-f
-h
-a
and -c
.-k
-l
-w
are ignored. This option implies
-a
.-M
pathman
searches for manual pages. The supplied
path must be a colon
(‘:
’) separated list of directories.
This search path may also be set using the environment variable
MANPATH
.-m
pathman
searches for manual pages. The supplied path must be
a colon (‘:
’) separated list of
directories. These directories will be searched before the standard
directories or the directories specified using the
-M
option or the MANPATH
environment variable.-S
subsectionBy default manual pages for all architectures are installed. Therefore this option can be used to view pages for one architecture whilst using another.
This option overrides the MACHINE
environment variable.
-s
] sectionIf not specified and a match is found in more than one section, the first match is selected from the following list: 1, 8, 6, 2, 3, 5, 7, 4, 9, 3p.
-w
The options -IKOTW
are also supported and
are documented in mandoc(1).
The options -fkl
are mutually exclusive and override
each other.
Guidelines for writing man pages can be found in mdoc(7).
The mandoc.db(5)
database is used for looking up manual page entries. In cases where the
database is absent, outdated, or corrupt, man
falls
back to looking for files called
name.section. If both a
formatted and an unformatted version of the same manual page, for example
cat1/foo.0 and man1/foo.1,
exist in the same directory, only the unformatted version is used. The
database is kept up to date with
makewhatis(8), which is
run by the weekly(8)
maintenance script.
MACHINE
man
searches any subdirectories, with the same
name as the current architecture, in every directory which it searches.
Machine specific areas are checked before general areas. The current
machine type may be overridden by setting the environment variable
MACHINE
to the name of a specific architecture, or
with the -S
option.
MACHINE
is case insensitive.MANPAGER
MANPAGER
is used instead of the standard
pagination program, more(1).
If less(1) is used, the
interactive :t
command can be used to go to the
definitions of various terms, for example command line options, command
modifiers, internal commands, environment variables, function names,
preprocessor macros,
errno(2) values, and some
other emphasized words. Some terms may have defining text at more than one
place. In that case, the
less(1) interactive commands
t
and T
can be used to
move to the next and to the previous place providing information about the
term last searched for with :t
. The
-O
tag
[=term] option documented
in the mandoc(1) manual
opens a manual page at the definition of a specific
term rather than at the beginning.MANPATH
man
may be
changed by specifying a path in the MANPATH
environment variable. The format of the path is a colon
(‘:
’) separated list of directories.
Invalid paths are ignored. Overridden by -M
,
ignored if -l
is specified.
If MANPATH
begins with a colon, it is
appended to the default list; if it ends with a colon, it is prepended
to the default list; or if it contains two adjacent colons, the standard
search path is inserted between the colons. If none of these conditions
are met, it overrides the standard search path.
PAGER
MANPAGER
is not defined. If neither PAGER nor
MANPAGER is defined, more(1)
-s
is used.The man
utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs. See
mandoc(1) for details.
Format a page for pasting extracts into an email message — avoid printing any UTF-8 characters, reduce the width to ease quoting in replies, and remove markup:
$ man -T ascii -O width=65 pledge |
col -b
Read a typeset page in a PDF viewer:
$ MANPAGER=mupdf man -T pdf
lpd
apropos(1), col(1), mandoc(1), ul(1), whereis(1), man.conf(5), mdoc(7)
The man
utility is compliant with the
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”)
specification.
The flags [-aCcfhIKlMmOSsTWw
], as well as
the environment variables MACHINE
,
MANPAGER
, and MANPATH
, are
extensions to that specification.
A man
command first appeared in
Version 3 AT&T UNIX.
The -w
option first appeared in
Version 7 AT&T UNIX;
-f
and -k
in
4BSD; -M
in
4.3BSD; -a
in
4.3BSD-Tahoe; -c
and
-m
in 4.3BSD-Reno;
-h
in 4.3BSD-Net/2;
-C
in NetBSD 1.0;
-s
and -S
in
OpenBSD 2.3; and -I
,
-K
, -l
,
-O
, and -W
in
OpenBSD 5.7. The -T
option
first appeared in AT&T System III UNIX
and was also added in OpenBSD 5.7.
March 9, 2019 | OpenBSD-6.6 |