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 di‐
31 rectory configured with manpath is recommended and necessary for
32 apropos(1) to work, and also for man(1) on operating systems like
33 OpenBSD that install each manual page with only one file name in
34 the file system, even if it documents multiple utilities or func‐
35 tions.
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 toc none html print table of contents
51 width integer ascii, utf8 right margin
52
54 /etc/man.conf
55
57 The following configuration file reproduces the defaults: installing it
58 is equivalent to not having a man.conf file at all.
59 manpath /usr/share/man
61 manpath /usr/X11R6/man
62 manpath /usr/local/man
63
65 apropos(1), man(1), makewhatis(8)
66
68 A relatively complicated man.conf file format first appeared in
69 4.3BSD-Reno. For OpenBSD 5.8, it was redesigned from scratch, aiming for
70 simplicity.
71
73 Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>
74BSD February 10, 2020 BSD