man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of a program, utility or function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed. A section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that section of the manual. The default action is to search in all of the available sections following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS), and to show only the first page found, even if page exists in several sections.
The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages they contain.
- Executable programs or shell commands
- System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
- Library calls (functions within program libraries)
- Special files (usually found in /dev)
- File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
- Games
- Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions)
- System administration commands (usually only for root)
- Kernel routines [Non standard]
関連コマンド
| コマンド | 概要 |
|---|---|
| mandb | used to initialise or manually update index database caches. The caches contain information relevant to the current state of the manual page system and the information stored within them is used by the man-db utilities to enhance their speed and functionality. |
| manpath | determine search path for manual pages. If $MANPATH is set, manpath will simply display its contents and issue a warning. If not, manpath will determine a suitable manual page hierarchy search path and display the results. |
| man-recode | converts multiple manual pages from one encoding to another, guessing the appropriate input encoding for each one. It is useful when permanently recoding pages written in legacy character sets, or in build systems that need to recode a set of pages to a single common encoding (usually UTF-8) for installation. When converting many manual pages, this program is much faster than running man --recode or manconv on each page. |