Man

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Also known as man pages.

Man is a command line utility that is found on almost every UNIX operating system.

Installation

Most systems have man installed but if it isn’t it can be installed using the package manager with the man-db package:

pacman -S man-db

Note

Some distributions may not use the package name man-db and may just be man, man-pages or mandoc. If you are unsure, consult your distribution’s documentation.

Other installations

The package man-pages can be used for both linux and POSIX pages. Localised versions are also available such as:

• man-pages-de for German
• man-pages-fr for French
• man-pages-zh_cn for Chinese
• man-pages-ru for Russian

For more info on extra packages see This page

Reading a man page

Simply run this and replace PAGE_NAME with the page you want:

man PAGE_NAME

Searching

When you don’t know the full name of a page you can search for it:

man -k REGEX

Sections

Man pages are divided into sections:

• 1 = User commands
• 2 = System calls
• 3 = Library functions
• 4 = Special files
• 5 = File formats & config
• 6 = Games
• 7 = Misc
• 8 = System admin commands

Examples

man 5 passwd   # Read about /etc/passwd file format
man -k network # Search for all pages about networking