man/man.1

] page

DESCRIPTION
        man is the system's manual pager.  The page argument given to man is usually the name of a program, utility, or library.  The manual page associated with this argument is then found and displayed.  A section, if provided, will direct man to look only in that section of the manual.  The default action is to search in all of the available sections following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS), and to show only the first page found, even if page exists in several sections.

        The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages they contain.

        1   Executable programs or shell commands
        2   System APIs (APIs provided by the kernel)
        3   User APIs (APIs provided by userspace)
        4   File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
        5   Miscellaneous documentation

        A manual page consists of several sections.

        Conventional section names include NAME, SYNOPSIS, CONFIGURATION, DESCRIPTION, OPTIONS, RETURN VALUES, ERRORS, ENVIRONMENT, FILES, VERSIONS, NOTES, BUGS, EXAMPLE, AUTHORS, and SEE ALSO.

        The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section and can be used as a guide in other sections.

        bold text      type exactly as shown.
        magenta text   replace with appropriate argument.
        [-abc]         any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
        -a|-b          options delimited by | cannot be used together.
        argument ...   argument is repeatable.

        Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device.  For instance, man will usually not be able to render colored text when running in a monochrome terminal.

        The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all possible invocations.

EXAMPLES
        man ls
            Display the manual page for the item (program) ls.

        man 3 shell
            Display the manual page for API shell from section 3.

DEFAULTS
        The order of sections to search may be overridden by the environment variable $MANSECT.  By default it is as follows:

                1 3 4 2 5

        The vt100-formatted manual page is displayed using a pager.  The default pager is less(1).

ENVIRONMENT
        MANPATH or MAN_PATH
                if $MANPATH or $MAN_PATH is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.

        MANPAGER or MAN_PAGER
                if $MANPAGER or $MAN_PAGER is set, man(1) will attempt to load the specified file as its pager.

FILES
        /usr/share/man
                A global manual page hierarchy.

COPYRIGHT
        Monolith System Utilities (c) 2020 Ocawesome101 under the GNU GPLv3.

SEE ALSO
        less(1)