path: root/gnu/usr.bin/man/man/man.man

.\" 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
.\"
.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd January 5, 1991
.Dt MAN 1
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm man
.Nd format and display the on-line manual pages
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Op Fl adfhkotw
.Op Fl m Ar system
.Op Fl p Ar string
.Op Fl M Ar path
.Op Fl P Ar pager
.Op Fl S Ar list
.Op Ar section
.Ar name ...
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm Man
formats and displays the on-line manual pages.  This version knows
about the
.Ev MANPATH
and
.Ev 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,
.Nm
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 `%compress%' command to save
space.
.Pp
The options are as follows:
.Bl -tag -width Fl
.It Fl M Ar path
Specify an alternate manpath.
By default,
.Nm
uses
.Xr manpath 1
(which is built into the
.Nm
binary)
to determine the path to search.  This option overrides the
.Ev MANPATH
environment variable.
.It Fl P Ar pager
Specify which pager to use.
By default,
.Nm
uses
.Nm %pager% ,
This option overrides the
.Ev PAGER
environment variable.
.It Fl S Ar list
List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search.
This option overrides the
.Ev MANSECT
environment variable.
.It Fl a
By default,
.Nm
will exit after displaying the first manual page it
finds.  Using this option forces
.Nm
to display all the manual pages
that match
.Ar name ,
not just the first.
.It Fl d
Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging
information.
.It Fl f
Equivalent to
.Nm whatis .
.It Fl h
Print a one line help message and exit.
.It Fl k
Equivalent to
.Nm apropos .
.It Fl m Ar system
Specify an alternate set of man pages to search based on the system
name given.
.It Fl o
Look for original, non-localized manpages only.
.Pp
By default,
.Nm
searches for a localized manpage
in a set of locale subdirectories of each
.Xr manpath 1
component.
.Pp
Locale name is taken from the first of three environment variables
with a nonempty value:
.Ev LC_ALL , LC_CTYPE ,
or
.Ev LANG ,
in the specified order.
.Pp
If the value could not be determined, or is not a valid locale name,
then only non-localized manpage will be looked up.
.Pp
Otherwise,
.Nm
will search in the following subdirectories, in the order of precedence:
.Pp
.Bl -item -offset indent -compact
.Sm off
.It
.Pa <lang> _ <country> . <charset>
.It
.Pa <lang> . <charset>
.It
.Pa en . <charset>
.Sm on
.El
.Pp
For example, for
.Dq de_DE.ISO_8859-1
locale,
.Nm
will search in the following subdirectories of the
.Pa /usr/share/man
manpath component:
.Pp
.Bl -item -offset indent -compact
.It
.Pa /usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO_8859-1
.It
.Pa /usr/share/man/de.ISO_8859-1
.It
.Pa /usr/share/man/en.ISO_8859-1
.El
.Pp
Finally,
if the search of localized manpage fails,
it will be looked up in the default
.Pa /usr/share/man
directory.
.It Fl p Ar 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
.Ev MANROFFSEQ
environment variable.
.It Fl t
Use
.Nm %troff%
to format the manual page, passing the output to stdout.
The output from
.Nm %troff%
may need to be passed through some filter or another before being
printed.
.It Fl w
Don't actually display the man pages, but do print the location(s) of
the files that would be formatted or displayed.
.El
.Sh ENVIRONMENT
.Bl -tag -width MANROFFSEQ
.It Ev LC_ALL , LC_CTYPE , LANG
These variables specify the preferred language for manual pages.
(See the
.Fl o
option above.)
.It Ev MACHINE
As some manual pages are intended only for specific architectures,
.Nm
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 by setting the environment
variable
.Ev MACHINE
to the name of a specific architecture.
.It Ev MANPATH
If
.Ev MANPATH
is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.
.It Ev MANROFFSEQ
If
.Ev 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.
.It Ev MANSECT
If
.Ev MANSECT
is set, its value is used to determine which manual sections to search.
.It Ev PAGER
If
.Ev PAGER
is set, its value is used as the name of the program to use to display
the man page.  By default,
.Nm %pager%
is used.
.El
.Sh EXAMPLES
.Pp
Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for getopt,
one would use:
.Pp
.Dl man getopt
.Pp
However, when referring to a specific section of the manual,
such as
.Xr getopt 3 ,
one would use:
.Pp
.Dl man 3 getopt
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr apropos 1 ,
.Xr groff 1 ,
.Xr manpath 1 ,
.Xr more 1 ,
.Xr whatis 1 ,
.Xr man 7 ,
.Xr mdoc 7 ,
.Xr mdoc.samples 7
.Sh BUGS
The
.Fl t
option only works if the
.Xr troff 1 Ns -like
program is installed.