1 Overview

man is, officially, "an interface to the on-line reference manual". In other words, it is a tool for obtaining help/information about specific terms. The abbreviated syntax is:

For the full syntax, enter man man (or see the on-line page for man ).

2 Manual Sections

The manual is normally divided into the following sections.

1. Executable Programs or Shell Commands
2. System Calls (Functions Provided by the Kernel)
3. Library Calls (Functions Provided in Libraries)
4. Devices and Special Files (Usually found in /dev)
5. File Formats and Conventions
6. Games
7. Miscellaneous
8. System Adniminstration Commands (Usually for root)
9. Non-Standard Kernel Routines

A particular manual page will include the section it is from in parentheses. In some cases, one term will appear in multiple sections. By default, man searches the sections in order (1, 8, 3, 2, 5, 4, 9, 6, 7) and only displays the first page found. You can request a specific section by including the section number (e.g., man 1 printf). If you want the pages from all sections, include the -a flag rather than the section number.

3 Searching the Manual

If you don't know the term you want the manual page for, you can search the manual (using wildcards or regular expressions) with the apropos tool.

4 Organization

Manual pages are typically organized as follows: name, synopsis, configuration, description, options, exit status, return value, errors, environment, files, versions, conforming to, notes, bugs, example, authors, and see also.