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The man page on man
The man page on man

Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like operating systems have extensive documentation known as man pages (short for "manual pages"). Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer A Unix-like (sometimes shortened to *nix) Operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system while not necessarily conforming An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination The Unix command used to display them is man. Each page is a self-contained document.

Contents

Usage

To read a manual page for a Unix command, one can use

man <command_name>

at a shell prompt; for example, "man ftp". In computing a shell is a piece of software that provides an interface for users In order to simplify paging through the output man generally uses the less file viewer, to return from this to the shell prompt enter q. less is a Terminal pager program on Unix, Windows and Unix-like systems used to view (but not change the contents of a

Pages are traditionally referred to using the notation "name(section)"; for example, ftp(1). The same page name may appear in more than one section of the manual, this can occur when the names of system calls, user commands, or macro packages conflict. In Computing, a system call is the mechanism used by an application program to request service from the Kernel. In Computing, a command is a directive to a computer program acting as an interpreter of some kind in order to perform a specific task The Troff typesetting system includes sets of commands called macros that are run before starting to process the document Two examples are man(1) and man(7), or exit(2) and exit(3). The syntax for accessing the non-default manual section varies between different man implementations. On Linux and *BSD, for example, the syntax for reading printf(3) is

man 3 printf

History

The UNIX Programmer's Manual was first published on November 3, 1971. Events 644 - Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim Caliph, is killed by a Persian slave in Medina. Year 1971 ( MCMLXXI) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar of the 1971 Gregorian calendar. The first actual man pages were written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at the insistence of Doug McIlroy in 1971. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and other Programming Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4 1943) commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932 is a Mathematician, Engineer, and Programmer. The troff macros used for man pages (-mm) were the general-purpose ones written by Ted Dolotta (later to be the first manager of USG and the principal author of the System III manual), with additions for the manuals. See also Trough. TROFF may also refer to a command in the BASIC programming language. At the time, the availability of online documentation through the manual page system was regarded as a great advance. To this day, virtually every Unix command line application comes with its man page, and many Unix users perceive a lack of man pages as a sign of low quality; indeed, some projects, such as Debian, go out of their way to write man pages for programs lacking one. Debian ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free and open source software. Few alternatives to man have enjoyed much popularity, with the possible exception of the GNU project's "info" system, an early and simple hypertext system. GNU ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free software. Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form (creating filetypes as dvi html pdf etc

However, the format of a single page for each application, the lack of classification within the sections and the relatively unsophisticated formatting facilities have motivated the development of alternative documentation systems, such as the previously mentioned info system.

Most Unix GUI applications (particularly those built using the GNOME and KDE development environments) now provide end-user documentation in HTML and include embedded HTML viewers such as yelp for reading the help within the application. A gnome is a Mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle KDE ( K Desktop Environment) (ˌkeɪdiːˈiː is a Free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use Desktop environment. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure

Usually the man pages are written in English. Translations into other languages can be also available on the system.

The default format of the man pages is troff, with either the macro package man (appearance oriented) or on some systems mdoc (semantic oriented). See also Trough. TROFF may also refer to a command in the BASIC programming language. The Troff typesetting system includes sets of commands called macros that are run before starting to process the document This makes it possible to typeset a man page to PostScript, PDF and various other formats for viewing or printing. PostScript ( PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative Programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982

Manual sections

The manual is generally split into eight numbered sections, organized as follows (on BSD Unix and Linux):

Section Description
1 General commands
2 System calls
3 C library functions
4 Special files (usually devices, those found in /dev) and drivers
5 File formats and conventions
6 Games and screensavers
7 Miscellanea
8 System administration commands and daemons

Unix System V uses a similar numbering scheme, except section 4 is file formats, section 5 is miscellany and section 7 is special files. Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks In Computing, a command is a directive to a computer program acting as an interpreter of some kind in order to perform a specific task In Computing, a system call is the mechanism used by an application program to request service from the Kernel. The C standard library (also known as libc) is a now-standardized collection of Header files and library routines used to implement common operations such In computing a device driver or software driver is a Computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a Hardware device A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a Computer file. A personal computer Game (also known as a computer game or simply PC game) is a Video game played on a Personal computer, rather A screensaver is a type of computer program initially designed to prevent " Phosphor burn-in " on CRT and plasma Computer In Computing, a command is a directive to a computer program acting as an interpreter of some kind in order to perform a specific task In Unix and other computer multitasking Operating systems a daemon (ˈdiːmən or /ˈdeɪmən/ is a Computer program that runs in the background Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV (and usually pronounced though rarely written as System 5 was one of the versions of the Unix Operating system

On some systems some of the following sections are available:

Section Description
0 C library header files
9 Kernel routines
n Tcl/Tk keywords
x The X Window System

The sections are further subdivided by means of a suffix letter, such that section 3C is for C library calls, 3M is for the math library, and so on. The C standard library (also known as libc) is a now-standardized collection of Header files and library routines used to implement common operations such In Computer programming, particularly in the C and C++ programming languages a header file or include file is a file, usually in In Computer science, the kernel is the central component of most computer Operating systems (OS Tcl (originally from "Tool Command Language" but nonetheless conventionally rendered as "Tcl" rather than "TCL" pronounced as " tickle " Tk is an Open source, Cross-platform Widget toolkit, that is a library of basic elements for building a Graphical user interface (GUI A consequence of this is that section 8 (system administration commands) is sometimes relegated to the 1M subsection of the main commands section. Some subsection suffixes have a general meaning across sections:

Subsection Description
p POSIX specifications
x X Window System documentation

Some versions of man cache the formatted versions of the last several pages viewed. POSIX (ˈpɒzɪks or "Portable Operating System Interface" is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define

To see options you can use with command man, enter the command man man.

Layout

All man pages follow a common layout that is optimized for presentation on a simple ASCII text display, possibly without any form of highlighting or font control. American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) Sections present may include:

Other sections may be present, but these are not well standardized across man pages. Common examples include: OPTIONS, EXIT STATUS, ENVIRONMENT, KNOWN BUGS, FILES, AUTHOR, REPORTING BUGS, HISTORY and COPYRIGHT.

See also

External links

Repositories of manual pages

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. MediaWiki is a web-based Wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing ( FOLDOC) is an online searchable encyclopedic Dictionary of Computing subjects The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software

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