L m m t F y

DESCRIPTION

The options are as follows:

-a

Display all matching manual pages.

-C file

Use the specified file instead of the default configuration file. This permits users to configure their own manual environment. See man.conf(5) for a description of the contents of this file.

-c

Copy the manual page to the standard output instead of using less(1) to paginate it. This is done by default if the standard output is not a terminal device.

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

A synonym for whatis(1). It searches for name in manual page names and displays the header lines from all matching pages. The search is case insensitive and matches whole words only.

-h

Display only the SYNOPSIS lines of the requested manual pages. Implies -a and -c.

-k

A synonym for apropos(1). Instead of name, an expression can be provided using the syntax described in the apropos(1) manual. By default, it displays the header lines of all matching pages.

-l

A synonym for mandoc(1). The name arguments are interpreted as filenames. No search is done and file, path, section, subsection, and -w are ignored. This option implies -a.

-M path

Override the list of directories to search for manual pages. The supplied path must be a colon (‘:’) separated list of directories. This option also overrides the environment variable MANPATH and any directories specified in the man.conf(5) file.

-m path

Augment the list of directories to search for manual pages. The supplied path must be a colon (‘:’) separated list of directories. These directories will be searched before those specified using the -M option, the MANPATH environment variable, the man.conf(5) file, or the default directories.

-S subsection

Only show pages for the specified machine(1) architecture. subsection is case insensitive.

By 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] section

Only select manuals from the specified section. The currently available sections are:

1

General commands (tools and utilities).

2

System calls and error numbers.

3

Library functions.

3p

perl(1) programmer's reference guide.

4

Device drivers.

5

File formats.

6

Games.

7

Miscellaneous information.

8

System maintenance and operation commands.

9

Kernel internals.

-w

List the pathnames of all matching manual pages instead of displaying any of them. If no name is given, list the directories that would be searched.

The options -IKOTW are also supported and are documented in mandoc(1). The options -fkl are mutually exclusive and override each other.

The search starts with the -m argument if provided, then continues with the -M argument, the MANPATH variable, the manpath entries in the man.conf(5) file, or with /usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/man by default. Within each of these, directories are searched in the order provided. Within each directory, the search proceeds according to the following list of sections: 1, 8, 6, 2, 3, 5, 7, 4, 9, 3p. The first match found is shown.

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.

Guidelines for writing man pages can be found in mdoc(7).