Manual Pages  — MAN

man – format and display the on-line manual pages

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION ENVIRONMENT EXAMPLES SEE ALSO BUGS

man [ -adfhkotw] [ -m arch [: machine]] [ -p string] [ -M path] [ -P pager] [ -S list] [ section] name ...

The man utility formats and displays the on-line manual pages. This version knows about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can have your own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you like to display the formatted pages. If section is specified, man only looks in that section of the manual. You may also specify the order to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the source files via command line options or environment variables. If enabled by the system administrator, formatted man pages will also be compressed with the "/usr/bin/gzip -c" command to save space.

The options are as follows:

-M path
	Specify an alternate manpath. By default, man uses manpath(1) (which is built into the man binary) to determine the path to search. This option overrides the MANPATH environment variable.
-P pager
	Specify which pager to use. By default, man uses "more -s". This option overrides the PAGER environment variable.
-S list
	List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search. This option overrides the MANSECT environment variable.
-a	By default, man will exit after displaying the first manual page it finds. Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages that match name, not just the first.
-d	Do not actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging information.
-f	Equivalent to whatis.
-h	Print a help message and exit.
-k	Equivalent to apropos.
-m arch [: machine]
	As some manual pages are intended only for specific architectures and machine types, apropos searches any subdirectories, with the same name as the current machine type and architecture, in every directory which it searches. Machine specific areas are checked before architecture specific areas, and architecture specific areas are checked before general areas. For example, for "i386:pc98", the following subdirectories will be searched for section 8 manpages, in order: man8/pc98, man8/i386, and man8. The current machine type may be overridden using this option or by setting the environment variable MACHINE to the name of a specific machine. The current architecture may be overridden using this option or by setting the environment variable MACHINE_ARCH to the name of a specific architecture. This option overrides the MACHINE and MACHINE_ARCH environment variables. A machine component, if omitted, defaults to arch.
-o	Look for original, non-localized manpages only. By default, apropos searches for a localized manpage in a set of locale subdirectories of each manpath(1) component. Locale name is taken from the first of three environment variables with a nonempty value: LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, or LANG, in the specified order. If the value could not be determined, or is not a valid locale name, then only non-localized manpage will be looked up. Otherwise, apropos will search in the following subdirectories, in the order of precedence:

	<lang>_<country>.<charset>
	<lang>.<charset>
	en.<charset>

For example, for the "de_DE.ISO8859-1" locale, apropos will search in the following subdirectories of the /usr/share/man manpath component:

	/usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO8859-1
	/usr/share/man/de.ISO8859-1
	/usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1

Finally, if the search of localized manpage fails, it will be looked up in the default /usr/share/man directory.

-p string	Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff(1) or troff(1). Not all installations will have a full set of preprocessors. Some of the preprocessors and the letters used to designate them are: eqn(e), grap(g), pic(p), tbl(t), vgrind(v), refer(r). This option overrides the MANROFFSEQ environment variable.
-t	Use "/usr/bin/groff -S -man" to format the manual page, passing the output to stdout. The default output format of groff(1) is Postscript, but see the manual page of groff(1) for ways to pick an alternate format. Depending on the selected format and the availability of printing devices, the output may need to be passed through some filter or another before being printed.
-w	Do not actually display the man pages, but do print the location(s) of the files that would be formatted or displayed.

LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG
	These variables specify the preferred language for manual pages. (See the -o option above.)
MACHINE	If MACHINE is set, its value is used to override the current machine type when searching machine specific subdirectories.
MACHINE_ARCH
	If MACHINE_ARCH is set, its value is used to override the current architecture when searching architecture specific subdirectories.
MANPATH	If MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.
MANROFFSEQ	If MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of preprocessors run before running nroff(1) or troff(1). By default, pages are passed through the table preprocessor (tbl(1)) before nroff(1).
MANSECT	If MANSECT is set, its value is used to determine which manual sections to search.
PAGER	If PAGER is set, its value is used as the name of the program to use to display the man page. By default, "more -s" is used.