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man displays information from the reference manuals. It can display complete manual pages that you select by title, or one-line summaries selected either by keyword (-k), or by the name of an associated file (-f).
A section, when given, applies to the titles that follow it on the command line (up to the next section, if any). man looks in the indicated section of the manual for those titles. section is either a digit (perhaps followed by a single letter indicating the type of manual page), or one of the words new, local, old, or public. The abbreviations n, l, o and p are also allowed. If section is omitted, man searches all reference sections (giving preference to commands over functions) and prints the first manual page it finds. If no manual page is located, man prints an error message.
The reference page sources are typically located in the /usr/man/man? directories. Since these directories are optionally installed, they may not reside on your host; you may have to mount /usr/man from a host on which they do reside. If there are preformatted, up-to-date versions in corresponding cat? or fmt? directories, man simply displays or prints those versions. If the preformatted version of interest is out of date or missing, man reformats it prior to display. If directories for the preformatted versions are not provided, man reformats a page whenever it is requested; it uses a temporary file to store the formatted text during display.
If the standard output is not a terminal, or if the `-' flag is given, man pipes its output through cat.1v Otherwise, man pipes its output through more.1 to handle paging and underlining on the screen.
Manual pages are troff.1 source files prepared with the -man macro package. Refer to man.7 or [a manual with the abbreviation DOCS] for more information.
When formatting a manual page, man examines the first line to determine whether it requires special processing.
If the first line of the manual page is a reference to another
manual page entry fitting the pattern:
man processes the indicated file in place of the current one. The reference must be expressed as a pathname relative to the root of the manual page directory subtree.
When the second or any subsequent line starts with .so, man ignores it; troff.1 or nroff.1 processes the request in the usual manner.
If the first line is a string of the form:
'\" X
where
X
is separated from the
`"'
by a single
SPACE
and consists of any combination of characters in the following list,
man
pipes its input to
troff.1
or
nroff.1
through the corresponding preprocessors.
If eqn or neqn is invoked, it will automatically read the file /usr/pub/eqnchar (see eqnchar.7 If nroff.1 is invoked, col.1v is automatically used.
Because troff is not 8-bit clean, man has not been made 8-bit clean.
The
-f
and
-k
options use the
/usr/man/whatis
database, which is created by
catman.8
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on a phototypesetter or on an ASCII terminal. However, on a terminal some information (indicated by font changes, for instance) is necessarily lost.
Some dumb terminals cannot process the vertical motions produced by the e (eqn(1)) preprocessing flag. To prevent garbled output on these terminals, when you use e also use t, to invoke col.1v implicitly. This workaround has the disadvantage of eliminating superscripts and subscripts -- even on those terminals that can display them. CTRL-Q will clear a terminal that gets confused by eqn.1 output.
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Created by unroff & hp-tools. © somebody (See intro for details). All Rights Reserved. Last modified 11/5/97