1MAN.CONF(5)                 BSD File Formats Manual                MAN.CONF(5)
2

NAME

4     man.conf — configuration file for man
5

DESCRIPTION

7     This is the configuration file for the man(1), apropos(1), and
8     makewhatis(8) utilities.  Its presence, and all directives, are optional.
9
10     This file is an ASCII text file.  Leading whitespace on lines, lines
11     starting with ‘#’, and blank lines are ignored.  Words are separated by
12     whitespace.  The first word on each line is the name of a configuration
13     directive.
14
15     The following directives are supported:
16
17     manpath path
18             Override the default search path for man(1), apropos(1), and
19             makewhatis(8).  It can be used multiple times to specify multiple
20             paths, with the order determining the manual page search order.
21
22             Each path is a tree containing subdirectories whose names consist
23             of the strings ‘man’ and/or ‘cat’ followed by the names of sec‐
24             tions, usually single digits.  The former are supposed to contain
25             unformatted manual pages in mdoc(7) and/or man(7) format; file
26             names should end with the name of the section preceded by a dot.
27             The latter should contain preformatted manual pages; file names
28             should end with ‘.0’.
29
30             Creating a mandoc.db(5) database with makewhatis(8) in each
31             directory configured with manpath is recommended and necessary
32             for apropos(1) to work, and also for man(1) on operating systems
33             like OpenBSD that install each manual page with only one file
34             name in the file system, even if it documents multiple utilities
35             or functions.
36
37     output option [value]
38             Configure the default value of an output option.  These direc‐
39             tives are overridden by the -O command line options of the same
40             names.  For details, see the mandoc(1) manual.
41
42             option      value      used by -T     purpose
43
44             fragment    none       html           print only body
45             includes    string     html           path to header files
46             indent      integer    ascii, utf8    left margin
47             man         string     html           path for Xr links
48             paper       string     ps, pdf        paper size
49             style       string     html           CSS file
50             width       integer    ascii, utf8    right margin
51
52     _whatdb path/whatis.db
53             This directive provides the same functionality as manpath, but
54             using a historic and misleading syntax.  It is kept for backward
55             compatibility for now, but will eventually be removed.
56

FILES

58     /etc/man.conf
59

EXAMPLES

61     The following configuration file reproduces the defaults: installing it
62     is equivalent to not having a man.conf file at all.
63
64           manpath /usr/share/man
65           manpath /usr/X11R6/man
66           manpath /usr/local/man
67

SEE ALSO

69     apropos(1), man(1), makewhatis(8)
70

HISTORY

72     A relatively complicated man.conf file format first appeared in
73     4.3BSD-Reno.  For OpenBSD 5.8, it was redesigned from scratch, aiming for
74     simplicity.
75

AUTHORS

77     Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>
78
79BSD                              June 20, 2019                             BSD
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