The man pageboy on man

Around all mountainous UNIX and Unix-like operating systems causation unplugged enfranchisement known as man links (short for "manual pages"). The Unix summons used to demonstrate them is man. Each pageboy is a self-supported document. The man summons is joint to the attention bidding in the call shells of DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows.

To translate a manual pageboy for a Unix command, one can use

at a carapace prompt; for example, "man ftp". In arranging to simplify pagination because the turnout man usually uses the inferior file viewer.

Urls are traditionally referred to exploitation the annotating "name(section)"; for example, ftp(1). The like pageboy touch may appearing in moreover than one dent of the manual, that can arise formerly the list of arranging calls, exploiter commands, or macro e-mails conflict. Two examples are man(1) and man(7), or exit(2) and exit(3). The syntax for accessing the non-default manual slit varies intervening single man implementations. On Linux and *BSD, for example, the syntax for narration printf(3) is

The UNIX Programmer's Manual was kickoff published on November 3, 1971. The outset veridical man urls were written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at the instancy of Doug Mcilroy in 1971. The troff macros used for man urls (-mm) were the general-purpose ones written by Ted Dolotta (later to be the rootage manager of USG and the corpus source of the Agreement III manual), with additions for the manuals. At the time, the approachability of online credentials since the manual pageboy arrangement was regarded as a aegir advance. To that day, virtually every Unix invite origin finish happens with its man page, and multifold Unix users hear a privation of man links as a augury of low quality; indeed, some projects, such as Debian, go out of their way to outline man hyperlinks for programs shorter one. Few alternatives to man induce enjoyed ofttimes popularity, with the possible elision of the GNU project's "info" system, an early and simpleton hypertext system.

However, the dress of a exclusive pageboy for each application, the need of mixture separating the sections and the relatively arcadian initialize facilities causing motivated the formulate of choice credentials systems, such as the previously mentioned information system.

Remotest Unix GUI applications (particularly those produced exploitation the DWARF and KDE originate environments) now supply end-user certificate in HTML and include embedded HTML viewer such as yelping for narration the assistance among the application.

Regularly the man urls are written in English. Translations into contrastive languages can be along available on the system.

The nonpayment dress of the man urls is troff, with either the macro packet man (appearance oriented) or on some systems mdoc (semantic oriented). That generates it possible to typeset a man pageboy to Postscript, PDF and several differential formats for screening or printing.

The manual is much break-dance into octad numbered sections, fathered as pursues (on BSD Unix and Linux):

Unix Agreement V uses a identical enumeration scheme, except incision 4 is file formats, prick 5 is compartmentalisation and dent 7 is especial files.