MAN(1)

NAME
man - display the on-line manual pages
manpath - show where man looks for manpages.

SYNOPSIS
man [-achtwz] [-C file] [-M path] [-m path] [-s section] [-S subsection] [section] name ...
manpath [-M path] [-m path]

DESCRIPTION
The man utility displays the Mastodon manual pages entitled name. The manpath utility shows where man will look for manual pages.

The options are as follows:

-a  Display all of the manual pages for a specified section and name combination. (Normally, only the first manual page found is displayed.)

-C  Use the specified file instead of the default configuration file. This permits users to configure their own manual environment. See man.conf(5) for a description of the contents of this file.

    If a man.conf(5) file is specified, the _save keyword is disabled, and formatted manpages will not be save in ``cat'' directories.

-c  Copy the manual page to the standard output instead of using less(1) to paginate it. This is done by default if the standard output is not a terminal device.

-h  Display only the “SYNOPSIS” lines of the requested manual pages.

-M  Override the list of standard directories which man searches for manual pages. The supplied path must be a colon (``:'') separated list of directories. This search path may also be set using the environment variable MANPATH.

-m  Augment the list of standard directories which man searches for manual pages. The supplied path must be a colon (``:'') separated list of directories. These directories will be searched before the standard directories or the directories specified using the -M option or the MANPATH environment variable.

-s  Another way of specifying the section, for compatibility with man on other operating systems.

-t  Display a postscript version of the manpages.

-w  List the pathnames of the manual pages which man would display for the specified section and name combination.

-z  Is a synonym for manpath

The optional section argument restricts the directories that man will search. The man configuration file (see man.conf(5)) specifies the possible section values that are currently available. If only a single argument is specified or if the first argument is not a valid section, man assumes that the argument is the name of a manual page to be displayed.

ENVIRONMENT

MANPATH
    The standard search path used by man may be overridden by specifying a path in the MANPATH environment variable. The format of the path is a colon (``:'') separated list of directories.

PAGER
    Any value of the environment variable PAGER will be used instead of the standard pagination program, less(1).

FILES
/etc/man.conf
    default man configuration file.

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), whatis(1), whereis(1), man.conf(5)

BUGS
The on-line manual pages are, by necessity, forgiving toward stupid display devices, causing a few manual pages to be not as nicely formatted as their typeset counterparts.

HISTORY
A man command appeared in AT&T UNIX.