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MAN(1)			  BSD General Commands Manual			MAN(1)

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

SYNOPSIS
     man [-adfhkotw] [-m arch[:machine]] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager]
	 [-S list] [section] name ...

DESCRIPTION
     The man utility formats and displays the on-line manual pages.  This ver‐
     sion 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 “/usr/bin/gzip -c” command to save space.

     The options are as follows:

     -M path   Specify an alternate manpath.  By default, man uses manpath(1)
	       (which is built into the man binary) to determine the path to
	       search.	This option overrides the MANPATH environment vari‐
	       able.

     -P pager  Specify which pager to use.  By default, man uses “more -s”.
	       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	       Do not actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of
	       debugging information.

     -f	       Equivalent to whatis.

     -h	       Print a help message and exit.

     -k	       Equivalent to apropos.

     -m arch[:machine]
	       As some manual pages are intended only for specific architec‐
	       tures and machine types, man searches any subdirectories, with
	       the same name as the current machine type and architecture, in
	       every directory which it searches.  Machine specific areas are
	       checked before architecture specific areas, and architecture
	       specific areas are checked before general areas.	 For example,
	       for “i386:pc98”, the following subdirectories will be searched
	       for section 8 manpages, in order: man8/pc98, man8/i386, and
	       man8.

	       The current machine type may be overridden using this option or
	       by setting the environment variable MACHINE to the name of a
	       specific machine.  The current architecture may be overridden
	       using this option or by setting the environment variable
	       MACHINE_ARCH to the name of a specific architecture.  This
	       option overrides the MACHINE and MACHINE_ARCH environment vari‐
	       ables.  A machine component, if omitted, defaults to arch.

     -o	       Look for original, non-localized manpages only.

	       By default, man searches for a localized manpage in a set of
	       locale subdirectories of each manpath(1) component.

	       Locale name is taken from the first of three environment vari‐
	       ables with a nonempty value: LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, or LANG, in the
	       specified order.

	       If the value could not be determined, or is not a valid locale
	       name, then only non-localized manpage will be looked up.

	       Otherwise, man will search in the following subdirectories, in
	       the order of precedence:

		     <lang>_<country>.<charset>
		     <lang>.<charset>
		     en.<charset>

	       For example, for the “de_DE.ISO8859-1” locale, man will search
	       in the following subdirectories of the /usr/share/man manpath
	       component:

		     /usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO8859-1
		     /usr/share/man/de.ISO8859-1
		     /usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1

	       Finally, if the search of localized manpage fails, it will be
	       looked up in the default /usr/share/man directory.

     -p string
	       Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff(1) or
	       troff(1).  Not all installations will have a full set of pre‐
	       processors.  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 environ‐
	       ment variable.

     -t	       Use “/usr/bin/groff -S -man” to format the manual page, passing
	       the output to stdout.  The default output format of groff(1) is
	       Postscript, but see the manual page of groff(1) for ways to
	       pick an alternate format.

	       Depending on the selected format and the availability of print‐
	       ing devices, the output may need to be passed through some fil‐
	       ter or another before being printed.

     -w	       Do not actually display the man pages, but do print the loca‐
	       tion(s) of the files that would be formatted or displayed.

ENVIRONMENT
     LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG
		   These variables specify the preferred language for manual
		   pages.  (See the -o option above.)

     MACHINE	   If MACHINE is set, its value is used to override the cur‐
		   rent machine type when searching machine specific subdirec‐
		   tories.

     MACHINE_ARCH  If MACHINE_ARCH is set, its value is used to override the
		   current architecture when searching architecture specific
		   subdirectories.

     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(1) or
		   troff(1).  By default, pages are passed through the table
		   preprocessor (tbl(1)) before nroff(1).

     MANSECT	   If MANSECT 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 pro‐
		   gram to use to display the man page.	 By default, “more -s”
		   is used.

EXAMPLES
     Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for “getopt”, one
     would use:

	   man getopt

     However, when referring to a specific section of the manual, such as
     getopt(3), one would use:

	   man 3 getopt

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1), groff(1), manpath(1), more(1), whatis(1), man(7), mdoc(7)

BUGS
     The -t option only works if the troff(1)-like program is installed.

BSD			       December 3, 2005				   BSD
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