The man command allows you to use the POSIX online documentation, in other words to have the syntax and description of a POSIX commands written to standard output.
Syntax
| Format 1: | man[ -x] command... |
| Format 2: | man -k expression |
Only the command syntax is written to standard output. If this option is not set the full description of the command is output.
Scans the POSIX-internal database. This database contains a brief description of every command. Every line which contains the specified expression is output.
The name of one or more POSIX commands. If there is no description available for one of the commands the following error message is output:
If more than one command is specified and -x is not set, the output command defined by the PAGER variable is called separately for each command.
An expression according to the syntax of the grep command. The search is performed case-insensitive ( |
File
/usr/share/man/En/*.txt.Z These files contain the manual entries; one file per command and language. /usr/share/man/En/man.index Brief descriptions of the commands. |
Variable
PAGER Determines the command which will display or process the information. The information will be sent to standard input of the command. The default value is |
Locale
The following environment variables affect the execution of man: LANG Determines the language for the output of documentation and of messages. If the contents of the variable start with "De" oder "de" the output language will be German. Otherwise it will be English. LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, that value overwrites the value of the LANG variable. |
Example 1
Displaying Information about the mkdir command:
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Example 2
Displaying all the commands which contain the string "attrib" in their brief description:
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Beispiel 3
Send the brief description of all commands to the default printer:
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Example 4
Displaying the syntax of the head command:
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See also
cat, more, lp |