NAME

man, apropos, whatis — display online manual documentation pages

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The man utility finds and displays online manual documentation pages. If mansect is provided, man restricts the search to the specific section of the manual.

The sections of the manual are:

1. General Commands Manual
2. System Calls Manual
3. Library Functions Manual
4. Kernel Interfaces Manual
5. File Formats Manual
6. Games Manual
7. Miscellaneous Information Manual
8. System Manager's Manual
9. Kernel Developer's Manual

Options that man understands:

-M manpath

Forces a specific colon separated manual path instead of the default search path. See manpath(1). Overrides the MANPATH environment variable.

-P pager

Use specified pager. Defaults to “less -sR” if color support is enabled, or “less -s”. Overrides the MANPAGER environment variable, which in turn overrides the PAGER environment variable.

-S mansect

Restricts manual sections searched to the specified colon delimited list. Defaults to “1:8:2:3:3lua:n:4:5:6:7:9:l”. Overrides the MANSECT environment variable.

-a

Display all manual pages instead of just the first found for each page argument.

-d

Print extra debugging information. Repeat for increased verbosity. Does not display the manual page.

-f

Emulate whatis(1). Note that only a subset of options will have any effect when man is invoked in this mode. See the below description of whatis options for details.

-h

Display short help message and exit.

-k

Emulate apropos(1). Note that only a subset of options will have any effect when man is invoked in this mode. See the below description of apropos options for details.

-m arch[:machine]

Override the default architecture and machine settings allowing lookup of other platform specific manual pages. This option is accepted, but not implemented, on macOS.

-o

Force use of non-localized manual pages. See IMPLEMENTATION NOTES for how locale specific searches work. Overrides the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG environment variables.

-p [eprtv]

Use the list of given preprocessors before running nroff(1) or troff(1). Valid preprocessors arguments:

e

eqn(1)

p

pic(1)

r

refer(1)

t

tbl(1)

v

vgrind(1)

Overrides the MANROFFSEQ environment variable.

-t

Send manual page source through troff(1) allowing transformation of the manual pages to other formats.

-w

Display the location of the manual page instead of the contents of the manual page.

Options that apropos and whatis understand:

-d

Same as the -d option for man.

-s

Same as the -S option for man.

When man is operated in apropos or whatis emulation mode, only a subset of its options will be honored. Specifically, -d, -M, -P, and -S have equivalent functionality in the apropos and whatis implementation provided. The MANPATH, MANSECT, and MANPAGER environment variables will similarly be honored.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

ENVIRONMENT

The following environment variables affect the execution of man:

LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG

Used to find locale specific manual pages. Valid values can be found by running the locale(1) command. See IMPLEMENTATION NOTES for details. Influenced by the -o option.

MACHINE_ARCH, MACHINE

Used to find platform specific manual pages. If unset, the output of “sysctl hw.machine_arch” and “sysctl hw.machine” is used respectively. See IMPLEMENTATION NOTES for details. Corresponds to the -m option.

MANPATH

The standard search path used by man(1) may be changed by specifying a path in the MANPATH environment variable. Invalid paths, or paths without manual databases, are ignored. Overridden by -M. If MANPATH begins with a colon, it is appended to the default list; if it ends with a colon, it is prepended to the default list; or if it contains two adjacent colons, the standard search path is inserted between the colons. If none of these conditions are met, it overrides the standard search path.

MANROFFSEQ

Used to determine the preprocessors for the manual source before running nroff(1) or troff(1). If unset, defaults to tbl(1). Corresponds to the -p option.

MANSECT

Restricts manual sections searched to the specified colon delimited list. Corresponds to the -S option.

MANWIDTH

If set to a numeric value, used as the width manpages should be displayed. Otherwise, if set to a special value “tty”, and output is to a terminal, the pages may be displayed over the whole width of the screen.

MANCOLOR

If set, enables color support.

MANPAGER

Program used to display files.

If unset, and color support is enabled, “less -sR” is used.

If unset, and color support is disabled, then PAGER is used. If that has no value either, “less -s” is used.

FILES

/etc/man.conf

System configuration file.

/usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf

Local configuration files.

EXIT STATUS

The man utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

Show the manual page for stat(2):

$ man 2 stat

Show all manual pages for ‘stat’.

$ man -a stat

List manual pages which match the regular expression either in the title or in the body:

$ man -k '\<copy\>.*archive'

Show the manual page for ls(1) and use cat(1) as pager:

$ man -P cat ls

Show the location of the ls(1) manual page:

$ man -w ls

SEE ALSO

apropos(1), intro(1), mandoc(1), manpath(1), whatis(1), intro(2), intro(3), intro(3lua), intro(4), intro(5), man.conf(5), intro(6), intro(7), mdoc(7), intro(8), intro(9)