The
man utility displays the manual pages named on the command line. Its options are as follows:
-a
Display all of the man pages for a specified section and name combination. (Normally, only the first man page found is displayed.)
-C
Use the specified
file instead of the default configuration file. This permits users to configure their own man environment. See
man.conf(5) for a description of the contents of this file.
-c
Copy the man page to the standard output instead of using
more(1) to paginate it. This is done by default if the standard output is not a terminal device.
-h
Display only the “SYNOPSIS” lines of the requested man pages. For commands, this is typically the command line usage information. For library functions, this usually contains the required include files and function prototypes.
-k
Display the header lines for any man pages matching
keyword(s), in the same manner as
apropos(1).
-M
Override the list of standard directories which man searches for man pages. The supplied path must be a colon (“:”) separated list of directories. This search path may also be set using the environment variable MANPATH. The subdirectories to be searched, and their search order, is specified by the “_subdir” line in the man configuration file.
-m
Augment the list of standard directories which man searches for man pages. The supplied path must be a colon (“:”) separated list of directories. These directories will be searched before the standard directories or the directories specified using the -M option or the MANPATH environment variable. The subdirectories to be searched, and their search order, is specified by the “_subdir” line in the man configuration file.
-s
Restrict the directories that
man will search to the specified section. The
man configuration file (see
man.conf(5)) specifies the possible
section values that are currently available.
-S
Display only man pages that have the specified string in the directory part of their filenames. This allows the man page search process criteria to be narrowed without having to change the MANPATH or “_default” variables.
-w
List the pathnames of the man pages which man would display for the specified section and name combination.
If the ‘
-s' option is not specified, there is more than one argument, the ‘
-k' option is not used, and the first argument is a valid section, then that argument will be used as if specified by the ‘
-s' option.
If
name is given with a full or relative path then
man interprets it as a file specification, so that you can do
man ./foo.5 or even
man /cd/foo/bar.1.gz.