man

man: show a manual page.

Synopsis

man [section] name

Description

man finds the manual page for name, formats it for the terminal and shows it through a pager. Pages are man(7) source, as on Linux, kept as /usr/share/man/mansection/name.section. With no section, sections 1, 8, 5 and 7 are searched, in that order.

On a terminal, the page is laid out to the terminal’s width, with bold and italic text (italics show underlined), and piped to $MANPAGER or $PAGER, else less(1). Into a pipe or a file, the plain text is written, 80 columns wide.

Environment

MANPATH: The manual trees to search, separated by :; /usr/share/man by default.
MANPAGER PAGER: The pager, run with sh -c; the first set is used.
LESS: Left as it is; when it isn’t set, man runs its pager with LESS=-R (as man-db does), so less(1) shows bold and underline instead of their escape sequences.

Page format

The formatter understands this part of man(7), and ignores other requests:

.TH title section: The page’s title, shown in its header and footer.
.SH .SS: A section heading, a subsection heading.
.PP .P .LP: A new paragraph (so does a blank line).
.TP: A tagged paragraph: the next line is the tag, the lines after it the indented body.
.IP tag: A tagged paragraph with the tag given.
.RS .RE: Indent further, and back.
.B .I: The line in bold, in italics.
.BR .RB .BI .IB .IR .RI: Words in fonts taking turns, with no spaces between them (quote a word to keep spaces in it).
.nf .fi: Lines as they are (no filling), and filled again.
.br .sp: A line break, a blank line.
.\”: A comment.

In text: \fB \fI \fR \fP change the font (bold, italic, roman, the previous one); \- is a minus, \e and \\ a backslash, \(em a dash, and nothing.

Exit status

0 on success; 1 with no name given; 16 if no page was found.

Examples

man ls
man 1 sh
man less > less.txt

Notes

There are no options and no -k; tables, other macros and other escapes are not supported.

man