The man page suite, including man, apropos, and whatis consists of programs that are used to read most of the documentation available on a Linux system. The whatis and apropos programs can be used to find documentation related to a particular subject. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
This release fixed shell-unsafe verification, which was missing the ampersand symbol, although this was being caught by another part of the code. The POSIX locale was unified with the C one. Additional checks were added for a defined but empty PAGER environment variable. whatis files are no longer updated on read-only partitions. bzip support was added to man2dvi and man2html. Experimental LZMA support was added to man and makewhatis. The Cygwin README was updated. Fixes were made to avoid shebang mangling in generated scripts.
man pages are located beneath /usr/share/man.
e.g., manual pages for "section 1" are located in /usr/share/man/man1/.
And /usr/share/man/man*p should contain manual pages for POSIX programmers.
I need to know what /usr/share/man/man*x directories should contain ? (1 Reply)
Hey people do u know how to disable the man command in linux???
i am not able to do anythg apart from disabling the permission for /usr/bin/...
i dont wanna uninstall the man / man pages also...
this has been one of the toughest challenges i have come across in linux...
can anybody... (5 Replies)
According to Sun documentation (Ldoms 1.1 Administration Guide), To access the ldm(1M) man page, add the directory path /opt/SUNWldm/man to the variable $MANPATH. When I add the lines:
MANPATH=$MANPATH:/opt/SUNWldm/man
export MANPATH
to .profile, exit root and re-login, I would have "man ldm"... (5 Replies)
hello every one im a new to unix i use solaris 9 experimental i would like to use real unix system but there are to many versions and i need someone to recommend a good one for me i also need help on how to use "man" (3 Replies)
Help,
it seem that i am unable to get man help form solaris 10.
I am running SunOS unknown 5.10 Generic_120012-14 i86pc i386 i86pc
when ever i try to man a command what i get is "No manual entry" like the one below.
# man grep
No manual entry for grep.
# man ls
No manual entry for ls.... (1 Reply)
Can any one show me how to create an alias account that silently copies local emails to the administrator (root) using a linux cmd line or GUI?
The answer needs to be very simplly explained at this stage, as I am new to the command prompt...expecialy in linux.
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Pipa:)
I... (2 Replies)
When reading man pages, I notice that sometimes commands are follwed by a number enclosed in parenthesis. such as:
mkdir calls the mkdir(2) system call.
What exactly does this mean? (4 Replies)
If i have my own application ( say 'myTool'), then is it possible to create a man page for it?
such that "man myTool" will give information about it.
if so how to go about it?
thanks in advance,
Nads (3 Replies)
LEXGROG(1) Manual pager utils LEXGROG(1)NAME
lexgrog - parse header information in man pages
SYNOPSIS
lexgrog [-m|-c] [-fhwV] [-E encoding] file ...
DESCRIPTION
lexgrog is an implementation of the traditional "groff guess" utility in lex. It reads the list of files on its command line as either man
page source files or preformatted "cat" pages, and displays their name and description as used by apropos and whatis, the list of prepro-
cessing filters required by the man page before it is passed to nroff or troff, or both.
If its input is badly formatted, lexgrog will print "parse failed"; this may be useful for external programs that need to check man pages
for correctness. If one of lexgrog's input files is "-", it will read from standard input; if any input file is compressed, a decompressed
version will be read automatically.
OPTIONS -m, --man
Parse input as man page source files. This is the default if neither --man nor --cat is given.
-c, --cat
Parse input as preformatted man pages ("cat pages"). --man and --cat may not be given simultaneously.
-w, --whatis
Display the name and description from the man page's header, as used by apropos and whatis. This is the default if neither --whatis
nor --filters is given.
-f, --filters
Display the list of filters needed to preprocess the man page before formatting with nroff or troff.
-E encoding, --encoding encoding
Override the guessed character set for the page to encoding.
-h, --help
Print a help message and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information.
EXIT STATUS
0 Successful program execution.
1 Usage error.
2 lexgrog failed to parse one or more of its input files.
EXAMPLES
$ lexgrog man.1
man.1: "man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals"
$ lexgrog -fw man.1
man.1 (t): "man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals"
$ lexgrog -c whatis.cat1
whatis.cat1: "whatis - display manual page descriptions"
$ lexgrog broken.1
broken.1: parse failed
WHATIS PARSING
mandb (which uses the same code as lexgrog) parses the NAME section at the top of each manual page looking for names and descriptions of
the features documented in each. While the parser is quite tolerant, as it has to cope with a number of different forms that have histori-
cally been used, it may sometimes fail to extract the required information.
When using the traditional man macro set, a correct NAME section looks something like this:
.SH NAME
foo - program to do something
Some manual pagers require the '-' to be exactly as shown; mandb is more tolerant, but for compatibility with other systems it is never-
theless a good idea to retain the backslash.
On the left-hand side, there may be several names, separated by commas. Names containing whitespace will be ignored to avoid pathological
behaviour on certain ill-formed NAME sections. The text on the right-hand side is free-form, and may be spread over multiple lines. If
several features with different descriptions are being documented in the same manual page, the following form is therefore used:
.SH NAME
foo, bar - programs to do something
.br
baz - program to do nothing
(A macro which starts a new paragraph, like .PP, may be used instead of the break macro .br.)
When using the BSD-derived mdoc macro set, a correct NAME section looks something like this:
.Sh NAME
.Nm foo
.Nd program to do something
There are several common reasons why whatis parsing fails. Sometimes authors of manual pages replace '.SH NAME' with '.SH MYPROGRAM', and
then mandb cannot find the section from which to extract the information it needs. Sometimes authors include a NAME section, but place
free-form text there rather than 'name - description'. However, any syntax resembling the above should be accepted.
SEE ALSO man(1), mandb(8), apropos(1), whatis(1).
NOTES
lexgrog attempts to parse files containing .so requests, but will only be able to do so correctly if the files are properly installed in a
manual page hierarchy.
AUTHOR
The code used by lexgrog to scan man pages was written by:
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
Colin Watson wrote the current incarnation of the command-line front-end, as well as this man page.
2.6.0.2 2011-04-13 LEXGROG(1)