man - View documentation

man - View documentation#

There are many command line programs installed. It is impossible to remember their exact functionality and options. Almost all of them are well documented. The documentation is called man page, is installed on most systems for fast reference. The man tool is used to display the man-pages.

The basic invocation is man pagename where pagename is the topic of the desired reference page. Typically this is a command name, e.g. man ls or man msn chmod. In a sense little more has to be said than referring to manual page of the manual itself: man man

Each man page is divided in several paragraphs, the most important ones (in the order they appear in the manual page) are:

  • NAME: A short summary about the tool or topic

  • SYNOPSIS On overview how to invoke the command.

  • DESCRIPTION A detailed listing of command options and their effects

  • EXAMPLES Basic examples for common command invocations

  • SEE ALSO References to further documentation and related topics

Searching man pages#

Sometimes it is not clear which man page should be consulted or what is the exact name of the man page. There are some commands which help to search across all man pages:

Command

Result

whatis name

Search for name in all man page titles

apropos name

Search for name in all man page NAME sections

man -K name

Search for name in all man pages. This is very slow and usually produces a lot of results.

On D-PHYS managed computers there is also the (non-standard) tool tldr name, which provides a handy short version of the man pages.

man page sections#

   1   Executable programs or shell commands
   2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
   3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
   4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
   5   File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
   6   Games
   7   Miscellaneous (including  macro  packages  and  conventions),  e.g.
       man(7), groff(7)
   8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
   9   Kernel routines [Non standard]
Contents