man pages
man stands for Manual, Linux man pages are
the equivalent of the help documentation available in Windows OS.
Here are some important points that you
should remember about the man pages
Man pages use a paging program ( more or less
) to display the information onto your screen.
Usual path for man pages in /usr/share/man
/etc/man.conf is the conf file for man and
here you can also define the paths where you want the man program
to look for man pages
Man pages are divided in sections ranging
from 1 to 8
The sections of man pages are given in the
table below
|
Section |
Description |
|
1 |
User programs |
|
2 |
System calls |
|
3 |
Library calls |
|
4 |
Special files (usually found in /dev) |
|
5 |
File formats |
|
6 |
Games |
|
7 |
Miscellaneous |
|
8 |
System administration |
In /usre/share/man there are directories
ranging form man1, man2…. to man8
Which contain the man pages for respective
sections
Here are some important variables associated
with man
MANSECT : this variable defines the order in
which the man program searches the various man section.
PAGER : this defines the paging program which
should be used to display man pages
MANPATH : the directories in which man should
look for man pages
Some of the common options used with man
are
man -d show debugging information
man -a show all results (otherwise man
just stops at the 1st result that is found), the next
result is displayed when the quit the current one
to see a summary of all the results in
various section you can use the switch man -f
man -w
show path of the man file found
To search for a keyword in the description of
all the man pages you can use the man –k
switch
apropos is also a shortcut for man –k
whatis is a shortcut for man –f
To specify a section in which man needs to
search use
man options
sectionname
|