man command examples

man – an interface to the on-line reference manuals

man ls

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

 man -a intro

Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.

man -t alias | lpr -Pps

Format the manual page referenced by `alias’, usually a shell manual page, into the default troff or groff format and pipe it to the printer named ps. The default output for groff is usually PostScript. man –help should advise as to which processor is bound to the -t option.

man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi

This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page ./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi) file. The redirection is necessary as the -T flag causes output to be directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a program such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a program such as dvips.

man -k printf

Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf as regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to apropos -r printf.

man -f smail

Lookup the manual pages referenced by smail and print out the short descriptions of any found. Equivalent to whatis -r smail.