MAN(1)							      General Commands Manual							    MAN(1)

NAME

       man - display online manual pages

SYNOPSIS

       man [-antkf] [-M path] [-s section] title ...

DESCRIPTION

       Man displays the online manual pages for the specified titles in the specified sections.  The sections are as follows:

       1      User Commands
	      Generic commands such as ls, cp, grep.

       2      System Calls
	      Low level routines that directly interface with the kernel.

       3      Library Routines
	      Higher level C language subroutines.

       4      Device Files
	      Describes devices in /dev.

       5      File Formats
	      Formats of files handled by various utilities and subroutines.

       6      Games
	      It's not UNIX without an adventure game.

       7      Miscellaneous
	      Macro packages, miscellaneous tidbits.

       8      System Utilities
	      Commands for the System Administrator.

       9      Documents
	      Larger manuals explaining some commands in more detail.

       (If you are new to Minix then try man hier, it will show you around the file system and give you many pointers to other manual pages.)

       By default, man will try the following files in a manual page directory for the command man -s 1 ls:

	      cat1/ls.1
	      cat1/ls.1.Z
	      man1/ls.1
	      man1/ls.1.Z

       Files  in the man[1-8] directories are formatted with nroff -man.  Those in man9 are formatted with nroff -mnx.	Files in the cat? directo-
       ries are preformatted.  Files with names ending in .Z are decompressed first with zcat (see compress(1)).  The end result is  presented	to
       the user using a pager if displaying on the screen.

       For  each  manual  page	directory in its search path, man will first try all the subdirectories of the manual page directory for the files
       above, and then the directory itself.  The directory /usr/man contains the standard manual pages, with manual pages for	optional  packages
       installed  in  a  subdirectory  of  /usr/man,  with the same structure as /usr/man.  The directory /usr/local/man contains manual pages for
       locally added software.	By default /usr/local/man is searched first, then /usr/man.

       A title is not simply used as a filename, because several titles may refer to the same manual page.  Each manual page directory contains  a
       database  of  titles  in  the  whatis(5)  file that is created by makewhatis(8) from the NAME sections of all the manual pages.	A title is
       searched in this database and the first title on a whatis line is used as a filename.

OPTIONS

       The options may be interspersed with the titles to search, and take effect for the titles after them.

       -a     Show all the manual pages or one line descriptions with the given title in all the specified sections in all the manual  directories
	      in the search path.  Normally only the first page found is shown.

       -n     Use nroff -man to format manual pages (default).

       -t     Use troff -man to format manual pages.

       -f     Use whatis(1) to show a one line description of the title from the whatis(5) file.

       -k     Use apropos(1) to show all the one line descriptions of the title anywhere in the whatis(5) files (implies -a).

       -M path
	      Use path as the search path for manual directories.

       -s section
	      Section  is  the section number the page is to be found in, or a comma separated list of sections to use.  Normally all sections are
	      searched.  The search is always in numerical order no matter what your section list looks like.  A single digit is treated as a sec-
	      tion number without the -s for compatibility with BSD-style man commands.

ENVIRONMENT

       MANPATH	      This is a colon separated list of directories to search for manual pages, by default /usr/local/man:/usr/man.

       PAGER	      The program to use to display the manual page or one line descriptions on the screen page by page.  By default more.

FILES

       /usr/man/whatis		One of the whatis(5) databases.

SEE ALSO

       nroff(1), troff(1), more(1), whatis(1), makewhatis(1), catman(1), whatis(5), man(7).

AUTHOR

       Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)

																	    MAN(1)