Using the man utility

You can display system documentation by typing man, followed by the name of a command or function. For example, the following command displays information on the ln(1) command:

man ln

Section numbers distinguish reference pages that have the same name. For example, printf(1) refers to a utility reference page and printf(3) refers to a function reference page. Use the -s option followed by the section number to specify a specific section. To see the reference page for the printf(1) utility, type:

man -s 1 printf

To see the reference page for the Windows-based printf(1w) utility, type:

man -s 1w printf

To see the reference page for the printf(3) function, type:

man -s 3 printf

If you do not specify a section number, and if more than one reference page name matches the name you provide, the first page that matches will be displayed.

You can create a directory named catadmin, which contains reference pages. For example, if catadmin contains a printf reference page, you can view the page by typing:

man admin printf

The MANPATH variable

The default setting for the MANPATH environment variable is /usr/share/man:/usr/X11R5/man. You can override the value of the MANPATH environment variable and search other directories by specifying them on the command line with the -M option. For more information, see man(1).

Searching for keywords

If you do not know which reference page addresses a particular topic, you can use the man command to search the subject lines of each reference page. The syntax for performing searches is:

man -k topic

The topic should be a basic regular expression. The man command performs a case-insensitive search for subject lines containing the topic. On many systems (but not Interix), the apropos command is an alias for man -k.