

MAN(1)                    Minix Programmer's Manual                     MAN(1)


NAME
     man - display online manual pages

SYNOPSIS
     man [-antkf] [-M path] [-s section] title ...

DESCRIPTION
     Man displays the online manual pages for  the  specified  titles  in  the
     specified sections.  The sections are as follows:

     1    User Commands
          Generic commands such as ls, cp, grep.

     2    System Calls
          Low level routines that directly interface with the kernel.

     3    Library Routines
          Higher level C language subroutines.

     4    Device Files
          Describes devices in /dev.

     5    File Formats
          Formats of files handled by various utilities and subroutines.

     6    Games
          It's not UNIX without an adventure game.

     7    Miscellaneous
          Macro packages, miscellaneous tidbits.

     8    System Utilities
          Commands for the System Administrator.

     9    Documents
          Larger manuals explaining some commands in more detail.

     (If you are new to Minix then try man hier, it will show you  around  the
     file system and give you many pointers to other manual pages.)

     By default, man will try the following files in a manual  page  directory
     for the command man -s 1 ls:

          cat1/ls.1
          cat1/ls.1.Z
          man1/ls.1
          man1/ls.1.Z





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MAN(1)                    Minix Programmer's Manual                     MAN(1)


     Files in the man[1-8] directories are formatted with nroff  -man.   Those
     in man9 are formatted with nroff -mnx.  Files in the cat? directories are
     preformatted.  Files with names ending in .Z are decompressed first  with
     zcat  (see compress(1)).  The end result is presented to the user using a
     pager if displaying on the screen.

     For each manual page directory in its search path, man will first try all
     the  subdirectories of the manual page directory for the files above, and
     then the directory itself.  The directory /usr/man contains the  standard
     manual  pages,  with  manual  pages  for optional packages installed in a
     subdirectory of /usr/man, with  the  same  structure  as  /usr/man.   The
     directory   /usr/local/man   contains  manual  pages  for  locally  added
     software.  By default /usr/local/man is searched first, then /usr/man.

     A title is not simply used as a  filename,  because  several  titles  may
     refer  to  the  same  manual page.  Each manual page directory contains a
     database of titles in the whatis(5) file that is created by makewhatis(8)
     from  the  NAME sections of all the manual pages.  A title is searched in
     this database and the first title on a whatis line is used as a filename.

OPTIONS
     The options may be interspersed with  the  titles  to  search,  and  take
     effect for the titles after them.

     -a   Show all the manual pages or one line descriptions  with  the  given
          title in all the specified sections in all the manual directories in
          the search path.  Normally only the first page found is shown.

     -n   Use nroff -man to format manual pages (default).

     -t   Use troff -man to format manual pages.

     -f   Use whatis(1) to show a one line description of the title  from  the
          whatis(5) file.

     -k   Use apropos(1) to show all the one line descriptions  of  the  title
          anywhere in the whatis(5) files (implies -a).

     -M path
          Use path as the search path for manual directories.

     -s section
          Section is the section number the page is to be found in, or a comma
          separated  list  of  sections  to  use.   Normally  all sections are
          searched.  The search is always in numerical order  no  matter  what
          your  section  list  looks  like.   A  single  digit is treated as a
          section number without the -s for compatibility with  BSD-style  man
          commands.




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MAN(1)                    Minix Programmer's Manual                     MAN(1)


ENVIRONMENT

     MANPATH        This is a colon separated list of  directories  to  search
                    for manual pages, by default /usr/local/man:/usr/man.

     PAGER          The program to use to display the manual page or one  line
                    descriptions on the screen page by page.  By default more.

FILES

     /usr/man/whatis          One of the whatis(5) databases.

SEE ALSO
     nroff(1),  troff(1),  more(1),   whatis(1),   makewhatis(1),   catman(1),
     whatis(5), man(7).

AUTHOR
     Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)


































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