NAME

     man - display online manual pages


SYNOPSIS

     man [-antkfq] [-M path] [-s section] title ...


DESCRIPTION

     Man displays the  online  manual  pages  for  the  specified
     titles  in the specified sections.  The sections are as fol-
     lows:

     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  sub-
          routines.

     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 3 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

     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 direc-
     tory 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  sub-
     directory  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(1) from the NAME sections
     of all the manual pages.  A title is searched in this  data-
     base  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).

     -q   Quietly check if all requested manual pages exist.   No
          output, no errors, just an exit code.

     -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.  Nor-
          mally 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.


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),  cat-
     man(1), whatis(5), man(7).


AUTHOR

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