Understanding the man utility

You can use the man(1) utility in Interix. The man command displays the reference page for a particular command or function.

The man command searches the directories listed in the MANPATH environment variable, which has a default value of /usr/share/man:/usr/X11R5/man. If MANPATH is not set, man searches the directory usr/share/man. Within each searched directory, man looks for directories named catx, where x is a string, usually a digit. Interix uses the following man sections:

1. Utility reference pages
2. System interfaces
3. Library calls
4. Device descriptions
5. File formats and other miscellaneous information

In addition to these standard UNIX sections, Interix also provides a section 1w that contains reference pages for Windows commands that are distributed with Interix.

Reference page formatting

Man reference pages are flat ASCII files. Emphasis is done with backspace (^H) sequences. For example, a bold letter is repeated, so b^Hb is displayed as an emphasized b.