Man page

From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Revision as of 22:24, 6 August 2014 by Jsummers (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search
File Format
Name man page
Ontology
Extension(s) .man, .1, .2, .3, .5, .7, .8, others

Man page format is a text format for help files. It is widely used on Unix and related computer systems. It is based on troff format.

Contents

How to display

Man pages can be displayed by a standard utility named man. They are usually first installed in a central location.

The man utility can display files directly, without needing them to be installed, but the way to do that depends on the implementation. To display a file named, say, xyzformat.5, at least one of the following commands is likely to work:

 $ man xyzformat.5
 $ man ./xyzformat.5
 $ man -l xyzformat.5
 $ nroff -man xyzformat.5
 $ groff -man -Tutf8 xyzformat.5

If all else fails, read the manual:

 $ man man

Specifications

Or run:

 $ man 7 man

Software

Links

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Toolbox