man(1) [bsd man page]

MAN(1)							      General Commands Manual							    MAN(1)

NAME

       man - print out the manual

SYNOPSIS

       man [ - ] [ -a ] [ -M path ] [ section ] title ...

DESCRIPTION

       Man  is	the  program  which provides on-line access to the UNIX manual.  If a section specifier is given, man looks in that section of the
       manual for the given title(s).  Section is either an Arabic section number (``3'' for example), or one of the words ``local'', ``new,''	or
       ``old''.   (The	abbreviations  ``l'', ``n'', and ``o'' are also allowed.)  If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual,
       giving preference to commands over library subroutines, and displays the first manual page it finds, if any.  If the -a option is supplied,
       man displays all applicable manual pages.

       Normally  man checks in standard locations (/usr/man and /usr/local/man) for manual information.  This can be changed by supplying a search
       path (a la the Bourne shell) with the -M flag.  The search path is a colon (``:'') separated list of directories in which  man  expects	to
       find the standard manual subdirectories.  This search path can also be set with the environmental variable MANPATH.

       Since  some  manual  pages  are	intended  for  use only on certain machines, man only searches those directories applicable to the current
       machine.  Man's determination of the current machine type can be overridden by setting the environmental variable MACHINE.

       If the standard output is a teletype, and the - flag is not provided, man uses more(1), or the pager provided by the environmental variable
       PAGER, to display the manual page.

       The  FORTRAN version of section 3 of the manual may be specified by supplying man with the section ``3f''.  Also, a specific section of the
       local manual may be specified by appending a number to the section, i.e. ``l5'' would indicate section 5 of the local manual.

FILES

       /usr/man 	       standard manual area
       /usr/man/cat?/*	       directories containing standard manual pages
       /usr/local/man/cat?/*   directories containing local manual pages
       /usr/src/man	       directories containing unformatted manual pages

SEE ALSO

       apropos(1), more(1), whatis(1), whereis(1)

BUGS

       The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter or on a typewriter, however, on a typewriter, some  information	is
       necessarily lost.

4th Berkeley Distribution					  April 19, 1988							    MAN(1)

MAN.CONF(5)                                                     File Formats Manual                                                    MAN.CONF(5)

NAME

       man.conf - configuration file for man

DESCRIPTION

       This is the configuration file for the man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8) utilities.  Its presence, and all directives, are optional.

       This file is an ASCII text file.  Leading whitespace on lines, lines starting with '#', and blank lines are ignored.  Words are separated
       by whitespace.  The first word on each line is the name of a configuration directive.

       The following directives are supported:

       manpath path
               Override the default search path for man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8).  It can be used multiple times to specify multiple
               paths, with the order determining the manual page search order.

               Each path is a tree containing subdirectories whose names consist of the strings 'man' and/or 'cat' followed by the names of
               sections, usually single digits.  The former are supposed to contain unformatted manual pages in mdoc(7) and/or man(7) format; file
               names should end with the name of the section preceded by a dot.  The latter should contain preformatted manual pages; file names
               should end with '.0'.

               Creating a mandoc.db(5) database with makewhatis(8) in each directory configured with manpath is recommended and necessary for
               apropos(1) to work, but not strictly required for man(1).

       output option [value]
               Configure the default value of an output option.  These directives are overridden by the -O command line options of the same names.
               For details, see the mandoc(1) manual.

                      option     value     used by -T
                      fragment   none      html
                      includes   string    html
                      indent     integer   ascii, utf8
                      man        string    html
                      paper      string    ps, pdf
                      style      string    html
                      width      integer   ascii, utf8

       _whatdb path/whatis.db
               This directive provides the same functionality as manpath, but using a historic and misleading syntax.  It is kept for backward
               compatibility for now, but will eventually be removed.

FILES

       /etc/man.conf

EXAMPLES

       The following configuration file reproduces the defaults: installing it is equivalent to not having a man.conf file at all.

             manpath /usr/share/man
             manpath /usr/X11R6/man
             manpath /usr/local/man

SEE ALSO

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

HISTORY

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

AUTHORS

       Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>

Debian                                                           December 28, 2016                                                     MAN.CONF(5)