| MAN(1) | General Commands Manual | MAN(1) |
NAME
man — display
manual pages
SYNOPSIS
man |
[-acfhklw] [-C
file] [-M
path] [-m
path] [-S
subsection] [[-s]
section] name ... |
DESCRIPTION
The man utility finds the manual page for
each name, formats it with
oxdoc(1) and shows it through a
pager.
Without a section, the sections are searched
in the order 1, 8, 6, 2, 3, 5, 7, 4, 9, and the first page found is shown. A
section may also be given as the first argument when a
name follows it, as in ‘man 8
init’.
The options are as follows:
-a- Show every matching page, not only the first.
-Cfile- Read file instead of /etc/man.conf.
-c- Do not use a pager.
-f- The same as whatis(1).
-h- Show only the SYNOPSIS section.
-k- The same as apropos(1).
-l- The arguments are file names, not page names.
-Mpath- Search the colon-separated manual directories in path instead of the default.
-mpath- Search the directories in path before the others.
-Ssubsection- Look in the architecture subdirectory subsection, by default the machine's.
-ssection- Only search section.
-w- Print the file names of the pages instead of showing them.
The -T, -O and
-W options of
oxdoc(1) are also accepted and passed
on.
A page is found in a manual directory by any of the names its NAME
section gives, through the directory's index,
oxdoc.db, which
makewhatis(8) builds; so
‘man less’ finds
more.1. Otherwise, or without an index, a page is
found as
manN/name.section,
where N is the first character of the section, or in
the architecture subdirectory of that directory.
ENVIRONMENT
FILES
- /etc/man.conf
- the manual directories
- /usr/share/man
- the system's manual pages
- oxdoc.db
- the index in each manual directory
EXIT STATUS
The man utility exits 0 on success, and 5
if a page was not found or the arguments were wrong.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), more(1), oxdoc(1), man.conf(5), man(7), mdoc(7), makewhatis(8)
HISTORY
A man command appeared in
Version 2 AT&T UNIX. This implementation
was written for OxideBSD.
| September 27, 2026 | OxideBSD |