gnu/usr.bin/man/man/man.1

.\" Man page for man
.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, John W. Eaton.
.\"
.\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public
.\" License as specified in the README file that comes with the man 1.0
.\" distribution.
.\"
.\" John W. Eaton
.\" jwe@che.utexas.edu
.\" Department of Chemical Engineering
.\" The University of Texas at Austin
.\" Austin, Texas  78712
.\"
.TH man 1 "Jan 5, 1991"
.LO 1
.SH NAME
man \- format and display the on-line manual pages
.SH SYNOPSIS
man [\-adfhktw] [\-m system] [\-p string] [\-M path] [\-P pager]
[\-S list] [section] name ...
.SH 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.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-\^M " path"
Specify an alternate manpath.  By default, man uses
.B manpath
to determine the path to search.  This option overrides the
.B MANPATH
environment variable.
.TP
.B \-\^P " pager"
Specify which pager to use.  By default, man uses
.B /usr/local/bin/less -sC,
This option overrides the
.B PAGER
environment variable.
.TP
.B \-\^S " list"
List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search.
This option overrides the
.B MANSECT
environment variable.
.TP
.B \-\^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
.B name,
not just the first.
.TP
.B \-\^d
Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging
information.
.TP
.B \-\^f
Equivalent to
.B whatis.
.TP
.B \-\^h
Print a one line help message and exit.
.TP
.B \-\^k
Equivalent to
.B apropos.
.TP
.B \-\^m " system"
Specify an alternate set of man pages to search based on the system
name given.
.TP
.B \-\^p " string"
Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff.
Not all installations will have a full set of preprocessors.
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
.B MANROFFSEQ
environment variable.
.TP
.B \-\^t
Use
.B /usr/bin/groff -Tps -man
to format the manual page, passing the output to
.B stdout.
The output from
.B /usr/bin/groff -Tps -man
may need to be passed through some filter or another before being
printed.
.TP
.B \-\^w
Don't actually display the man pages, but do print the location(s) of
the files that would be formatted or displayed.
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.TP \w'MANROFFSEQ\ \ 'u
.B MANPATH
If
.B MANPATH
is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.
.TP
.B MANROFFSEQ
If
.B 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.
.TP
.B MANSEC
If
.B MANSEC
is set, its value is used to determine which manual sections to search.
.TP
.B PAGER
If
.B PAGER
is set, its value is used as the name of the program to use to display
the man page.  By default,
.B /usr/local/bin/less -sC
is used.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
apropos(1), whatis(1), manpath(1), less(1), groff(1).
.SH BUGS
The
.B \-t
option only works if a troff-like program is installed.