College of Engineering & CS Wright State University Dayton, Ohio 45435-0001

CEG 333: Introduction to Unix Prabhaker Mateti man

Syntax: man [SECTION] PAGE_NAME
apropos KEYWORD ...

The manpages are Unix's online documentation system. They cover many diverse topics—command-line utilities, C Standard Library functions, and file formats, for example. Most anything someone would want to know when working with a standard Unix system is in there somewhere.

The manpages are divided into sections, or volumes, based on their content (see "man 7 man" for more information on the setup of the man system.):

1. User commands
2. System calls
3. Programmers' Reference
4. Special files and devices
5. File formats and conventions
6. Games
7. Miscellaneous and Macros
8. System management commands

Warning: If there are two manpages with the same name in different sections, man loads the lowest-section-numbered page by default. For example, man printf won't find documentation on the printf() function, but man 3 printf will.

The standard manpage viewer uses the vi key commands. The most important of these are :q to quit and / to search for a regular expression. Emacs also has a man package, which is accessed with M-x man

There is also a keyword search facility, which displays the name, section, and a short description all pages matching one or more keywords. This is accessed with apropos KEYWORD ... or man -k KEYWORD ....