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A History of Unix
Unix in Summary
An introductory tutorial on Unix...
Selecting a Shell
Regular Expressions...
Perl and Unix...
Help with vi...
Shell scripting...
The 10 Unix commands every beginner needs to know...
The 10 most misunderstood commands...
The 62 Core Commands
Commands by Category
Alphabetic list of commands...
Copyright/Copyleft info...
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man
DESCRIPTION
- find, format, and display manual pages
SYNOPSIS
- man [ -adt][ -M path ][section] name ...
OPTIONS
-
- -a
- Display all man pages that match name, rather than displaying just the first then exiting.
- -d
- Display debugging information rather than man pages.
- -f
- display 'whatis'-type summaries
- -M path
- Specify a path to search for man pages. This overrides the MANPATH environment variable.
- -s (-S on some systems) section.
- Specify a list of sections to search.
- -t
- Use groff (or troff) to format the display.
USAGE
- Manual Page Sections
Entries in the reference manuals are organized into sections.
A section name consists of a major section name, typically a single digit, optionally followed by a subsection name, typically one or more letters.
An unadorned major section name acts as an abbreviation for the section of the same name along with all of its subsections.
Each section contains descriptions apropos to a particular reference category, with subsections refining these distinctions.
See the intro manual pages for an explanation of the classification used in this release.
- Search Path
Before searching for a given name, man constructs a list of candidate directories and sections.
man searches for name in the directories specified by the MANPATH environment variable.
- Within the manual page directories, man confines its search to the sections specified in the following order:
- sections specified on the command line with the -s (or -S) option
- sections embedded in the MANPATH environment variable
- sections specified in the man.cf file for each directory specified in the MANPATH environment variable
- If none of the above exist, man searches each directory in the manual page path, and displays the first matching manual page found.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
- MANPATH
- The directory to search for manual pages.
- PAGER
- Sets the program for displaying manual pages.
SEE ALSO
- apropos
- more
- whatis
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