1MAN.CONF(5) BSD File Formats Manual MAN.CONF(5)
2
4 man.conf — configuration file for man
5
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 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 The following directives are supported:
16 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 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 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 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 option value used by -T purpose
43 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 _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
58 /etc/man.conf
59
61 The following configuration file reproduces the defaults: installing it
62 is equivalent to not having a man.conf file at all.
63 manpath /usr/share/man
65 manpath /usr/X11R6/man
66 manpath /usr/local/man
67
69 apropos(1), man(1), makewhatis(8)
70
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
77 Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>
78BSD June 20, 2019 BSD