1MAN(1) Manual pager utils MAN(1)
2
6 man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
7
9 man [-C file] [-d] [-D] [--warnings[=warnings]] [-R encoding] [-L
10 locale] [-m system[,...]] [-M path] [-S list] [-e extension] [-i|-I]
11 [--regex|--wildcard] [--names-only] [-a] [-u] [--no-subpages] [-P
12 pager] [-r prompt] [-7] [-E encoding] [--no-hyphenation] [--no-justifi‐
13 cation] [-p string] [-t] [-T[device]] [-H[browser]] [-X[dpi]] [-Z]
14 [[section] page ...] ...
15 man -k [apropos options] regexp ...
16 man -K [-w|-W] [-S list] [-i|-I] [--regex] [section] term ...
17 man -f [whatis options] page ...
18 man -l [-C file] [-d] [-D] [--warnings[=warnings]] [-R encoding] [-L
19 locale] [-P pager] [-r prompt] [-7] [-E encoding] [-p string] [-t]
20 [-T[device]] [-H[browser]] [-X[dpi]] [-Z] file ...
21 man -w|-W [-C file] [-d] [-D] page ...
22 man -c [-C file] [-d] [-D] page ...
23 man [-?V]
24
26 man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is
27 normally the name of a program, utility or function. The manual page
28 associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed. A
29 section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that section of
30 the manual. The default action is to search in all of the available
31 sections, following a pre-defined order and to show only the first page
32 found, even if page exists in several sections.
33 The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the
35 types of pages they contain.
36 1 Executable programs or shell commands
39 2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
40 3 Library calls (functions within program libraries)
41 4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
42 5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
43 6 Games
44 7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g.
45 man(7), groff(7)
46 8 System administration commands (usually only for root)
47 9 Kernel routines [Non standard]
48 A manual page consists of several sections.
50 Conventional section names include NAME, SYNOPSIS, CONFIGURATION,
52 DESCRIPTION, OPTIONS, EXIT STATUS, RETURN VALUE, ERRORS, ENVIRONMENT,
53 FILES, VERSIONS, CONFORMING TO, NOTES, BUGS, EXAMPLE, AUTHORS, and
54 SEE ALSO.
55 The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section and can be used
57 as a guide in other sections.
58 bold text type exactly as shown.
61 italic text replace with appropriate argument.
62 [-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
63 -a|-b options delimited by | cannot be used together.
64 argument ... argument is repeatable.
65 [expression] ... entire expression within [ ] is repeatable.
66 Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device. For instance,
68 man will usually not be able to render italics when running in a termi‐
69 nal, and will typically use underlined or coloured text instead.
70 The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all
72 possible invocations. In some cases it is advisable to illustrate sev‐
73 eral exclusive invocations as is shown in the SYNOPSIS section of this
74 manual page.
75
77 man ls
78 Display the manual page for the item (program) ls.
79 man -a intro
81 Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages
82 contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between suc‐
83 cessive displays or skip any of them.
84 man -t alias | lpr -Pps
86 Format the manual page referenced by `alias', usually a shell man‐
87 ual page, into the default troff or groff format and pipe it to the
88 printer named ps. The default output for groff is usually Post‐
89 Script. man --help should advise as to which processor is bound to
90 the -t option.
91 man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi
93 This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual
94 page ./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi) file. The redi‐
95 rection is necessary as the -T flag causes output to be directed to
96 stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a program
97 such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a program
98 such as dvips.
99 man -k printf
101 Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword
102 printf as regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent
103 to apropos -r printf.
104 man -f smail
106 Lookup the manual pages referenced by smail and print out the short
107 descriptions of any found. Equivalent to whatis -r smail.
108
110 Many options are available to man in order to give as much flexibility
111 as possible to the user. Changes can be made to the search path, sec‐
112 tion order, output processor, and other behaviours and operations
113 detailed below.
114 If set, various environment variables are interrogated to determine the
116 operation of man. It is possible to set the `catch all' variable
117 $MANOPT to any string in command line format with the exception that
118 any spaces used as part of an option's argument must be escaped (pre‐
119 ceded by a backslash). man will parse $MANOPT prior to parsing its own
120 command line. Those options requiring an argument will be overridden
121 by the same options found on the command line. To reset all of the
122 options set in $MANOPT, -D can be specified as the initial command line
123 option. This will allow man to `forget' about the options specified in
124 $MANOPT although they must still have been valid.
125 The manual pager utilities packaged as man-db make extensive use of
127 index database caches. These caches contain information such as where
128 each manual page can be found on the filesystem and what its whatis
129 (short one line description of the man page) contains, and allow man to
130 run faster than if it had to search the filesystem each time to find
131 the appropriate manual page. If requested using the -u option, man
132 will ensure that the caches remain consistent, which can obviate the
133 need to manually run software to update traditional whatis text data‐
134 bases.
135 If man cannot find a mandb initiated index database for a particular
137 manual page hierarchy, it will still search for the requested manual
138 pages, although file globbing will be necessary to search within that
139 hierarchy. If whatis or apropos fails to find an index it will try to
140 extract information from a traditional whatis database instead.
141 These utilities support compressed source nroff files having, by
143 default, the extensions of .Z, .z and .gz. It is possible to deal with
144 any compression extension, but this information must be known at com‐
145 pile time. Also, by default, any cat pages produced are compressed
146 using gzip. Each `global' manual page hierarchy such as /usr/share/man
147 or /usr/X11R6/man may have any directory as its cat page hierarchy.
148 Traditionally the cat pages are stored under the same hierarchy as the
149 man pages, but for reasons such as those specified in the File Hierar‐
150 chy Standard (FHS), it may be better to store them elsewhere. For
151 details on how to do this, please read manpath(5). For details on why
152 to do this, read the standard.
153 International support is available with this package. Native language
155 manual pages are accessible (if available on your system) via use of
156 locale functions. To activate such support, it is necessary to set
157 either $LC_MESSAGES, $LANG or another system dependent environment
158 variable to your language locale, usually specified in the POSIX 1003.1
159 based format:
160 <language>[_<territory>[.<character-set>[,<version>]]]
162 If the desired page is available in your locale, it will be displayed
164 in lieu of the standard (usually American English) page.
165 Support for international message catalogues is also featured in this
167 package and can be activated in the same way, again if available. If
168 you find that the manual pages and message catalogues supplied with
169 this package are not available in your native language and you would
170 like to supply them, please contact the maintainer who will be coordi‐
171 nating such activity.
172 For information regarding other features and extensions available with
174 this manual pager, please read the documents supplied with the package.
175
177 man will search for the desired manual pages within the index database
178 caches. If the -u option is given, a cache consistency check is per‐
179 formed to ensure the databases accurately reflect the filesystem. If
180 this option is always given, it is not generally necessary to run mandb
181 after the caches are initially created, unless a cache becomes corrupt.
182 However, the cache consistency check can be slow on systems with many
183 manual pages installed, so it is not performed by default, and system
184 administrators may wish to run mandb every week or so to keep the data‐
185 base caches fresh. To forestall problems caused by outdated caches,
186 man will fall back to file globbing if a cache lookup fails, just as it
187 would if no cache was present.
188 Once a manual page has been located, a check is performed to find out
190 if a relative preformatted `cat' file already exists and is newer than
191 the nroff file. If it does and is, this preformatted file is (usually)
192 decompressed and then displayed, via use of a pager. The pager can be
193 specified in a number of ways, or else will fall back to a default is
194 used (see option -P for details). If no cat is found or is older than
195 the nroff file, the nroff is filtered through various programs and is
196 shown immediately.
197 If a cat file can be produced (a relative cat directory exists and has
199 appropriate permissions), man will compress and store the cat file in
200 the background.
201 The filters are deciphered by a number of means. Firstly, the command
203 line option -p or the environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is interrogated.
204 If -p was not used and the environment variable was not set, the ini‐
205 tial line of the nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string. To
206 contain a valid preprocessor string, the first line must resemble
207 '\" <string>
209 where string can be any combination of letters described by option -p
211 below.
212 If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default
214 set is used.
215 A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary for‐
217 matter (nroff or [tg]roff with -t) and executed. Alternatively, if an
218 executable program mandb_nfmt (or mandb_tfmt with -t) exists in the man
219 tree root, it is executed instead. It gets passed the manual source
220 file, the preprocessor string, and optionally the device specified with
221 -T or -E as arguments.
222
224 Non argument options that are duplicated either on the command line, in
225 $MANOPT, or both, are not harmful. For options that require an argu‐
226 ment, each duplication will override the previous argument value.
227 General options
229 -C file, --config-file=file
230 Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
231 ~/.manpath.
232 -d, --debug
234 Print debugging information.
235 -D, --default
237 This option is normally issued as the very first option and
238 resets man's behaviour to its default. Its use is to reset
239 those options that may have been set in $MANOPT. Any options
240 that follow -D will have their usual effect.
241 --warnings[=warnings]
243 Enable warnings from groff. This may be used to perform sanity
244 checks on the source text of manual pages. warnings is a comma-
245 separated list of warning names; if it is not supplied, the
246 default is "mac". See the “Warnings” node in info groff for a
247 list of available warning names.
248 Main modes of operation
250 -f, --whatis
251 Equivalent to whatis. Display a short description from the man‐
252 ual page, if available. See whatis(1) for details.
253 -k, --apropos
255 Equivalent to apropos. Search the short manual page descrip‐
256 tions for keywords and display any matches. See apropos(1) for
257 details.
258 -K, --global-apropos
260 Search for text in all manual pages. This is a brute-force
261 search, and is likely to take some time; if you can, you should
262 specify a section to reduce the number of pages that need to be
263 searched. Search terms may be simple strings (the default), or
264 regular expressions if the --regex option is used.
265 -l, --local-file
267 Activate `local' mode. Format and display local manual files
268 instead of searching through the system's manual collection.
269 Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source
270 file in the correct format. No cat file is produced. If '-' is
271 listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from stdin.
272 When this option is not used, and man fails to find the page
273 required, before displaying the error message, it attempts to
274 act as if this option was supplied, using the name as a filename
275 and looking for an exact match.
276 -w, --where, --path, --location
278 Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the loca‐
279 tion(s) of the source nroff files that would be formatted.
280 -W, --where-cat, --location-cat
282 Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the loca‐
283 tion(s) of the cat files that would be displayed. If -w and -W
284 are both specified, print both separated by a space.
285 -c, --catman
287 This option is not for general use and should only be used by
288 the catman program.
289 -R encoding, --recode=encoding
291 Instead of formatting the manual page in the usual way, output
292 its source converted to the specified encoding. If you already
293 know the encoding of the source file, you can also use man‐
294 conv(1) directly. However, this option allows you to convert
295 several manual pages to a single encoding without having to
296 explicitly state the encoding of each, provided that they were
297 already installed in a structure similar to a manual page hier‐
298 archy.
299 Finding manual pages
301 -L locale, --locale=locale
302 man will normally determine your current locale by a call to the
303 C function setlocale(3) which interrogates various environment
304 variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To tempo‐
305 rarily override the determined value, use this option to supply
306 a locale string directly to man. Note that it will not take
307 effect until the search for pages actually begins. Output such
308 as the help message will always be displayed in the initially
309 determined locale.
310 -m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
312 If this system has access to other operating system's manual
313 pages, they can be accessed using this option. To search for a
314 manual page from NewOS's manual page collection, use the option
315 -m NewOS.
316 The system specified can be a combination of comma delimited
318 operating system names. To include a search of the native oper‐
319 ating system's manual pages, include the system name man in the
320 argument string. This option will override the $SYSTEM environ‐
321 ment variable.
322 -M path, --manpath=path
324 Specify an alternate manpath to use. By default, man uses man‐
325 path derived code to determine the path to search. This option
326 overrides the $MANPATH environment variable and causes option -m
327 to be ignored.
328 A path specified as a manpath must be the root of a manual page
330 hierarchy structured into sections as described in the man-db
331 manual (under "The manual page system"). To view manual pages
332 outside such hierarchies, see the -l option.
333 -S list, -s list, --sections=list
335 List is a colon- or comma-separated list of `order specific'
336 manual sections to search. This option overrides the $MANSECT
337 environment variable. (The -s spelling is for compatibility
338 with System V.)
339 -e sub-extension, --extension=sub-extension
341 Some systems incorporate large packages of manual pages, such as
342 those that accompany the Tcl package, into the main manual page
343 hierarchy. To get around the problem of having two manual pages
344 with the same name such as exit(3), the Tcl pages were usually
345 all assigned to section l. As this is unfortunate, it is now
346 possible to put the pages in the correct section, and to assign
347 a specific `extension' to them, in this case, exit(3tcl). Under
348 normal operation, man will display exit(3) in preference to
349 exit(3tcl). To negotiate this situation and to avoid having to
350 know which section the page you require resides in, it is now
351 possible to give man a sub-extension string indicating which
352 package the page must belong to. Using the above example, sup‐
353 plying the option -e tcl to man will restrict the search to
354 pages having an extension of *tcl.
355 -i, --ignore-case
357 Ignore case when searching for manual pages. This is the
358 default.
359 -I, --match-case
361 Search for manual pages case-sensitively.
362 --regex
364 Show all pages with any part of either their names or their
365 descriptions matching each page argument as a regular expres‐
366 sion, as with apropos(1). Since there is usually no reasonable
367 way to pick a "best" page when searching for a regular expres‐
368 sion, this option implies -a.
369 --wildcard
371 Show all pages with any part of either their names or their
372 descriptions matching each page argument using shell-style wild‐
373 cards, as with apropos(1) --wildcard. The page argument must
374 match the entire name or description, or match on word bound‐
375 aries in the description. Since there is usually no reasonable
376 way to pick a "best" page when searching for a wildcard, this
377 option implies -a.
378 --names-only
380 If the --regex or --wildcard option is used, match only page
381 names, not page descriptions, as with whatis(1). Otherwise, no
382 effect.
383 -a, --all
385 By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable
386 manual page it finds. Using this option forces man to display
387 all the manual pages with names that match the search criteria.
388 -u, --update
390 This option causes man to perform an `inode level' consistency
391 check on its database caches to ensure that they are an accurate
392 representation of the filesystem. It will only have a useful
393 effect if man is installed with the setuid bit set.
394 --no-subpages
396 By default, man will try to interpret pairs of manual page names
397 given on the command line as equivalent to a single manual page
398 name containing a hyphen or an underscore. This supports the
399 common pattern of programs that implement a number of subcom‐
400 mands, allowing them to provide manual pages for each that can
401 be accessed using similar syntax as would be used to invoke the
402 subcommands themselves. For example:
403 $ man -aw git diff
405 /usr/share/man/man1/git-diff.1.gz
406 To disable this behaviour, use the --no-subpages option.
408 $ man -aw --no-subpages git diff
410 /usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz
411 /usr/share/man/man3/Git.3pm.gz
412 /usr/share/man/man1/diff.1.gz
413 Controlling formatted output
415 -P pager, --pager=pager
416 Specify which output pager to use. By default, man uses less
417 -s. This option overrides the $MANPAGER environment variable,
418 which in turn overrides the $PAGER environment variable. It is
419 not used in conjunction with -f or -k.
420 The value may be a simple command name or a command with argu‐
422 ments, and may use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or
423 double quotes). It may not use pipes to connect multiple com‐
424 mands; if you need that, use a wrapper script, which may take
425 the file to display either as an argument or on standard input.
426 -r prompt, --prompt=prompt
428 If a recent version of less is used as the pager, man will
429 attempt to set its prompt and some sensible options. The
430 default prompt looks like
431 Manual page name(sec) line x
433 where name denotes the manual page name, sec denotes the section
435 it was found under and x the current line number. This is
436 achieved by using the $LESS environment variable.
437 Supplying -r with a string will override this default. The
439 string may contain the text $MAN_PN which will be expanded to
440 the name of the current manual page and its section name sur‐
441 rounded by `(' and `)'. The string used to produce the default
442 could be expressed as
443 \ Manual\ page\ \$MAN_PN\ ?ltline\ %lt?L/%L.:
445 byte\ %bB?s/%s..?\ (END):?pB\ %pB\\%..
446 (press h for help or q to quit)
447 It is broken into three lines here for the sake of readability
449 only. For its meaning see the less(1) manual page. The prompt
450 string is first evaluated by the shell. All double quotes,
451 back-quotes and backslashes in the prompt must be escaped by a
452 preceding backslash. The prompt string may end in an escaped $
453 which may be followed by further options for less. By default
454 man sets the -ix8 options.
455 If you want to override man's prompt string processing com‐
457 pletely, use the $MANLESS environment variable described below.
458 -7, --ascii
460 When viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7 bit terminal or
461 terminal emulator, some characters may not display correctly
462 when using the latin1(7) device description with GNU nroff.
463 This option allows pure ascii manual pages to be displayed in
464 ascii with the latin1 device. It will not translate any latin1
465 text. The following table shows the translations performed:
466 some parts of it may only be displayed properly when using GNU
467 nroff's latin1(7) device.
468 Description Octal latin1 ascii
471 ──────────────────────────────────────────
472 continuation 255 ‐ -
473 hyphen
474 bullet (middle 267 · o
475 dot)
476 acute accent 264 ´ '
477 multiplication 327 × x
478 sign
479 If the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal may be
481 set up for latin1 characters and this option is not necessary.
482 If the latin1 and ascii columns are identical, you are reading
483 this page using this option or man did not format this page
484 using the latin1 device description. If the latin1 column is
485 missing or corrupt, you may need to view manual pages with this
486 option.
487 This option is ignored when using options -t, -H, -T, or -Z and
489 may be useless for nroff other than GNU's.
490 -E encoding, --encoding=encoding
492 Generate output for a character encoding other than the default.
493 For backward compatibility, encoding may be an nroff device such
494 as ascii, latin1, or utf8 as well as a true character encoding
495 such as UTF-8.
496 --no-hyphenation, --nh
498 Normally, nroff will automatically hyphenate text at line breaks
499 even in words that do not contain hyphens, if it is necessary to
500 do so to lay out words on a line without excessive spacing.
501 This option disables automatic hyphenation, so words will only
502 be hyphenated if they already contain hyphens.
503 If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent
505 nroff from hyphenating a word at an inappropriate point, do not
506 use this option, but consult the nroff documentation instead;
507 for instance, you can put "\%" inside a word to indicate that it
508 may be hyphenated at that point, or put "\%" at the start of a
509 word to prevent it from being hyphenated.
510 --no-justification, --nj
512 Normally, nroff will automatically justify text to both margins.
513 This option disables full justification, leaving justified only
514 to the left margin, sometimes called "ragged-right" text.
515 If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent
517 nroff from justifying certain paragraphs, do not use this
518 option, but consult the nroff documentation instead; for
519 instance, you can use the ".na", ".nf", ".fi", and ".ad"
520 requests to temporarily disable adjusting and filling.
521 -p string, --preprocessor=string
523 Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or
524 troff/groff. Not all installations will have a full set of pre‐
525 processors. Some of the preprocessors and the letters used to
526 designate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind
527 (v), refer (r). This option overrides the $MANROFFSEQ environ‐
528 ment variable. zsoelim is always run as the very first pre‐
529 processor.
530 -t, --troff
532 Use groff -mandoc to format the manual page to stdout. This
533 option is not required in conjunction with -H, -T, or -Z.
534 -T[device], --troff-device[=device]
536 This option is used to change groff (or possibly troff's) output
537 to be suitable for a device other than the default. It implies
538 -t. Examples (provided with Groff-1.17) include dvi, latin1,
539 ps, utf8, X75 and X100.
540 -H[browser], --html[=browser]
542 This option will cause groff to produce HTML output, and will
543 display that output in a web browser. The choice of browser is
544 determined by the optional browser argument if one is provided,
545 by the $BROWSER environment variable, or by a compile-time
546 default if that is unset (usually lynx). This option implies
547 -t, and will only work with GNU troff.
548 -X[dpi], --gxditview[=dpi]
550 This option displays the output of groff in a graphical window
551 using the gxditview program. The dpi (dots per inch) may be 75,
552 75-12, 100, or 100-12, defaulting to 75; the -12 variants use a
553 12-point base font. This option implies -T with the X75,
554 X75-12, X100, or X100-12 device respectively.
555 -Z, --ditroff
557 groff will run troff and then use an appropriate post-processor
558 to produce output suitable for the chosen device. If groff
559 -mandoc is groff, this option is passed to groff and will sup‐
560 press the use of a post-processor. It implies -t.
561 Getting help
563 -?, --help
564 Print a help message and exit.
565 --usage
567 Print a short usage message and exit.
568 -V, --version
570 Display version information.
571
573 0 Successful program execution.
574 1 Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
576 2 Operational error.
578 3 A child process returned a non-zero exit status.
580 16 At least one of the pages/files/keywords didn't exist or wasn't
582 matched.
583
585 MANPATH
586 If $MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search for
587 manual pages.
588 MANROFFOPT
590 The contents of $MANROFFOPT are added to the command line every
591 time man invokes the formatter (nroff, troff, or groff).
592 MANROFFSEQ
594 If $MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of
595 preprocessors to pass each manual page through. The default
596 preprocessor list is system dependent.
597 MANSECT
599 If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sec‐
600 tions and it is used to determine which manual sections to
601 search and in what order.
602 MANPAGER, PAGER
604 If $MANPAGER or $PAGER is set ($MANPAGER is used in preference),
605 its value is used as the name of the program used to display the
606 manual page. By default, less -s is used.
607 The value may be a simple command name or a command with argu‐
609 ments, and may use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or
610 double quotes). It may not use pipes to connect multiple com‐
611 mands; if you need that, use a wrapper script, which may take
612 the file to display either as an argument or on standard input.
613 MANLESS
615 If $MANLESS is set, man will not perform any of its usual pro‐
616 cessing to set up a prompt string for the less pager. Instead,
617 the value of $MANLESS will be copied verbatim into $LESS. For
618 example, if you want to set the prompt string unconditionally to
619 “my prompt string”, set $MANLESS to ‘-Psmy prompt string’.
620 BROWSER
622 If $BROWSER is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of com‐
623 mands, each of which in turn is used to try to start a web
624 browser for man --html. In each command, %s is replaced by a
625 filename containing the HTML output from groff, %% is replaced
626 by a single percent sign (%), and %c is replaced by a colon (:).
627 SYSTEM If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had
629 been specified as the argument to the -m option.
630 MANOPT If $MANOPT is set, it will be parsed prior to man's command line
632 and is expected to be in a similar format. As all of the other
633 man specific environment variables can be expressed as command
634 line options, and are thus candidates for being included in
635 $MANOPT it is expected that they will become obsolete. N.B. All
636 spaces that should be interpreted as part of an option's argu‐
637 ment must be escaped.
638 MANWIDTH
640 If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the line length for
641 which manual pages should be formatted. If it is not set, man‐
642 ual pages will be formatted with a line length appropriate to
643 the current terminal (using an ioctl(2) if available, the value
644 of $COLUMNS, or falling back to 80 characters if neither is
645 available). Cat pages will only be saved when the default for‐
646 matting can be used, that is when the terminal line length is
647 between 66 and 80 characters.
648 MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING
650 Normally, when output is not being directed to a terminal (such
651 as to a file or a pipe), formatting characters are discarded to
652 make it easier to read the result without special tools. How‐
653 ever, if $MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING is set to any non-empty value,
654 these formatting characters are retained. This may be useful
655 for wrappers around man that can interpret formatting charac‐
656 ters.
657 MAN_KEEP_STDERR
659 Normally, when output is being directed to a terminal (usually
660 to a pager), any error output from the command used to produce
661 formatted versions of manual pages is discarded to avoid inter‐
662 fering with the pager's display. Programs such as groff often
663 produce relatively minor error messages about typographical
664 problems such as poor alignment, which are unsightly and gener‐
665 ally confusing when displayed along with the manual page. How‐
666 ever, some users want to see them anyway, so, if
667 $MAN_KEEP_STDERR is set to any non-empty value, error output
668 will be displayed as usual.
669 LANG, LC_MESSAGES
671 Depending on system and implementation, either or both of $LANG
672 and $LC_MESSAGES will be interrogated for the current message
673 locale. man will display its messages in that locale (if avail‐
674 able). See setlocale(3) for precise details.
675
677 /etc/man_db.conf
678 man-db configuration file.
679 /usr/share/man
681 A global manual page hierarchy.
682 /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
684 A traditional global index database cache.
685 /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
687 An FHS compliant global index database cache.
688
690 apropos(1), groff(1), less(1), manpath(1), nroff(1), troff(1),
691 whatis(1), zsoelim(1), setlocale(3), manpath(5), ascii(7), latin1(7),
692 man(7), catman(8), mandb(8), the man-db package manual, FSSTND
693
695 1990, 1991 - Originally written by John W. Eaton (jwe@che.utexas.edu).
696 Dec 23 1992: Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) applied bug fixes supplied by
698 Willem Kasdorp (wkasdo@nikhefk.nikef.nl).
699 30th April 1994 - 23rd February 2000: Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk)
701 has been developing and maintaining this package with the help of a few
702 dedicated people.
703 30th October 1996 - 30th March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco <fpo‐
705 lacco@debian.org> maintained and enhanced this package for the Debian
706 project, with the help of all the community.
707 31st March 2001 - present day: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> is
709 now developing and maintaining man-db.
7102.6.3 2012-09-17 MAN(1)