FreeBSD Man Pages

man(1)

NAME

     man -- format and display the on-line manual pages

SYNOPSIS

     man [-adfhkotw] [-m machine] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager] [-S list]
	 [section] name ...

DESCRIPTION

     Man formats and displays the on-line manual pages.  This version knows
     about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can have your
     own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you like to
     display the formatted pages.  If section is specified, man only looks in
     that section of the manual.  You may also specify the order to search the
     sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the source files
     via command line options or environment variables.  If enabled by the
     system administrator, formatted man pages will also be compressed with
     the `/usr/bin/gzip -c' command to save space.

     The options are as follows:

     -M path	 Specify an alternate manpath.	By default, man uses
		 manpath(1) (which is built into the man binary) to determine
		 the path to search.  This option overrides the MANPATH envi-
		 ronment variable.

     -P pager	 Specify which pager to use.  By default, man uses more -s.
		 This option overrides the PAGER environment variable.

     -S list	 List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search.
		 This option overrides the MANSECT environment variable.

     -a 	 By default, man will exit after displaying the first manual
		 page it finds.  Using this option forces man to display all
		 the manual pages that match name, not just the first.

     -d 	 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of
		 debugging information.

     -f 	 Equivalent to whatis.

     -h 	 Print a help message and exit.

     -k 	 Equivalent to apropos.

     -m machine  As some manual pages are intended only for specific architec-
		 tures, man searches any subdirectories, with the same name as
		 the current architecture, in every directory which it
		 searches.  Machine specific areas are checked before general
		 areas.  The current machine type may be overridden using this
		 option or by setting the environment variable MACHINE to the
		 name of a specific architecture.  This option overrides the
		 MACHINE environment variable.

     -o 	 Look for original, non-localized manpages only.

		 By default, man searches for a localized manpage in a set of
		 locale subdirectories of each manpath(1) component.

		 Otherwise, man will search in the following subdirectories,
		 in the order of precedence:

		       <lang>_<country>.<charset>
		       <lang>.<charset>
		       en.<charset>

		 For example, for ``de_DE.ISO8859-1'' locale, man will search
		 in the following subdirectories of the /usr/share/man manpath
		 component:

		       /usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO8859-1
		       /usr/share/man/de.ISO8859-1
		       /usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1

		 Finally, if the search of localized manpage fails, it will be
		 looked up in the default /usr/share/man directory.

     -p string	 Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or
		 troff.  Not all installations will have a full set of pre-
		 processors.  Some of the preprocessors and the letters used
		 to designate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t),
		 vgrind (v), refer (r).  This option overrides the MANROFFSEQ
		 environment variable.

     -t 	 Use /usr/bin/groff -S -man to format the manual page, passing
		 the output to stdout.	The output from /usr/bin/groff -S -man
		 may need to be passed through some filter or another before
		 being printed.

     -w 	 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print the loca-
		 tion(s) of the files that would be formatted or displayed.

ENVIRONMENT

     LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG
		 These variables specify the preferred language for manual
		 pages.  (See the -o option above.)

     MACHINE	 If MACHINE is set, its value is used to override the current
		 machine type when searching machine specific subdirectories.

     MANPATH	 If MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search
		 for manual pages.

     MANROFFSEQ  If MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set
		 of preprocessors run before running nroff or troff.  By
		 default, pages are passed through the table preprocessor
		 before nroff.

     MANSECT	 If MANSECT is set, its value is used to determine which man-
		 ual sections to search.

     PAGER	 If PAGER is set, its value is used as the name of the program
		 to use to display the man page.  By default, more -s is used.

EXAMPLES

     Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for getopt, one

SEE ALSO

     apropos(1), groff(1), manpath(1), more(1), whatis(1), man(7), mdoc(7)

BUGS

     The -t option only works if the troff(1)-like program is installed.

FreeBSD 5.4			January 5, 1991 		   FreeBSD 5.4

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