bsd man page for man

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)