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)