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)