man(1)

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

SYNOPSIS
man [-adfhktw] [-m system] [-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 `%compress%' command to save space.

OPTIONS

-M  path
    Specify an alternate manpath. By default, man uses manpath to determine the path to search. This option overrides the MANPATH environment variable.

-P  pager
    Specify which pager to use. By default, man uses %pager%, 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 one line help message and exit.

-k  Equivalent to apropos.

-m  system
    Specify an alternate set of man pages to search based on the system name given.

-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 MANROFFSEQ environment variable.

-t  Use %troff% to format the manual page, passing the output to stdout. The output from %troff% 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 location(s) of the files that would be formatted or displayed.

ENVIRONMENT

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.

MANSEC
    If MANSEC is set, its value is used to determine which manual 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, %pager% is used.

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), whatis(1), manpath(1), less(1), groff(1).

BUGS
The -t option only works if a troff-like program is installed.