Module 87
man (BSD)

DESCRIPTION

The external man command searches for the on-line copy of the UNIX Reference Manual entry for a particular command. If found, the manual entry is formated and displayed to your screen. The manuals are often refered to as "man pages." There is one man page entry per command.

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NOTE:  
Some vendors no longer distribute System V Release 3.0 or later versions with on-line manual pages. Therefore, the man command does not exist. In most cases it has been replaced by the help facility. Which, unfortunately, seems to vary widely between vendors.

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COMMAND FORMAT

Following is the general format of the man command.

  man  [ - ] [ -M path ] [ section ] title
  man  [ - ] [ -M path ] [ -f file ]
  man  [ - ] [ -M path ] [ -k keyword ]

Options

The following list describes the options and their arguments that may be used to control how man functions.

Arguments

The following list describes the arguments that may be passed to the man command.

FURTHER DISCUSSION

The on-line copy of the Reference Manual is not always available to you. If you are on a small system or your system was running low on disk storage, the system administrator may have removed some of all of the manual entries to gain disk space. The entries use up approxiatmately 3 megabytes of storage.

The following is a description of each section and the layout of the manuals in their on-line and physical format.

Sections

There are twelve sections of the reference manuals. They are:

Some of the sections listed have subsections. The numbers of the sections follow the name of a command in parentheses. For example, cat(1) informs you that you can find the entry for the cat command in section 1 of the reference manual. The notation cu(1C) informs you that the cu command is used for communications. The following list describes the subsections.

Physical Layout

There are three reference manuals containing only the entries relavent to the named audience. They are:

User's Reference Manual (Sections 1 & 6)

Programmer's Reference Manual ( Sections 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5)

System Administrator's Reference Manual ( Sections 1, 7, & 8 or 1m)

On-line Layout

The on-line copy of the reference manual resides in these corresponding directories:

/usr/man/man1

/usr/man/man2

...

/usr/man/man8

For more information on how to read a man page refer to the Introduction of a Reference Manual. Each vendor may implement the manuals as they desire. Most BSD type vendors support the BSD man page layout while most System V vendors that support the man pages tend to follow the AT&T standard.

DIAGNOSTICS AND BUGS

The man pages that are already formated in the catman directory were formated for a type 37 terminal, therefore, they may not display correctly on your terminal. To reformat for your terminal use the -T option. If you want to send a man page to a typesetting device, you must again use the -T option and pipe your man command into the lp (lpr) command. It may be worth your time and effort to request assistance from your system administrator on this subject.

RELATED FILES

The man command writes to the standard output. It searches the following directories:

/usr/man/man[1-8]/*

/usr/catman/man[1-8]/*

MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/local/man:your_man_directory

APPLICATIONS

The man command is used to display the reference manuals for the current UNIX system. It provides on-line documentation for every standard command. As UNIX becomes more user friendly some of the systems have removed the man command and provided the help command.

TYPICAL OPERATION

In this activity you use the man command to generate the man page for the pwd command. Begin at the shell prompt.

1.  Type man pwd and press Return. The man page for pwd appears after it is formated by the nroff command.

2.  Turn to Module 5 (BSD) to continue the learning sequence.