Mac OS X / Darwin man pages : man (1)
man (1)
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man - format and display the on-line manual pages
man [-adfhkotw] [-m machine] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager] [-S list]
[section] name ...
Man 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 less -Rse.
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
- Don't 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 machine
- As some manual pages are intended only for specific architectures,
man searches any subdirectories, with the same name as
the current architecture, in every directory which it
searches. Machine specific areas are checked before general
areas. The current machine type may be overridden using this
option or by setting the environment variable MACHINE to the
name of a specific architecture. This option overrides the
MACHINE environment variable.
- -p string
- Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or
troff. 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 -mandoc to format the manual page,
passing the output to stdout. The output from /usr/bin/groff
-S -mandoc may need to be passed through some filter or
another before being printed.
- -w
- Don't 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.
- 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 or troff. By
default, pages are passed through the table preprocessor
before nroff.
- 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, less -Rse is
used. The -R flag to less is critical to the correct display
of the output, so the -R flag is appended to the value specified
by PAGER if it looks like less is being used.
Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for getopt, one
would use:
man getopt
However, when referring to a specific section of the manual, such as
getopt(3)
, one would use:
man 3 getopt
apropos(1)
, groff(1)
, less(1)
, manpath(1)
, whatis(1)
, man(7)
, mdoc(7)
The -t option only works if the troff(1)
-like program is installed.
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