UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Could someone please tell me how to search the entire man pages? I know man -k whatever searched the description but I wanna search the entire man page.

man your_entry_name will search the entire man pages but it will stop when the first matching entry is found. So if multiple sections have man pages for the searched entry man will stop at the first one found...but man with the -k option will search all sections and print them out. So as an example try man intro and man -k intro and notice the difference.

Wrong. It searches for page names only.

Sort of. It does look through every section but only the description section in the man page.

I know the difference.

If you have GNU's man then the -K option searches for the specified string, and -k is equivalent to apropos. Otherwise, I usually just grep -H the man path.

Time for COKEDUDE to reveal what Operating System and version he is running.
This is a remarkably complex subject. The "man" pages are designed to be searched with the "man" command.

Personally I look for an internet HTML version of the "man" pages and use Google site search.
Within a normal unix system you would need to explode every "man" page into text format then search the text versions. This assumes that you have enough disc space.

Methyl is on the right track. This is how it is normally done. See Ubuntu Manpages and Fedora Manpages for examples. Both use custom Google search on manpages that were converted to HTML format.

I bounce back and forth between Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu) and Fedora. I am using Fedora right now but prefer Mint.

Thx for the Fedora one .