MAN(1)

NAME
man - print out the manual

SYNOPSIS
man [ - ] [ -a ] [ -M path ] [ section ] title ...

DESCRIPTION
Man is the program which provides on-line access to the UNIX manual. If a section specifier is given, man looks in that section of the manual for the given title(s). Section is either an Arabic section number (``3'' for example), or one of the words ``local'', ``new,'' or ``old''. (The abbreviations ``l'', ``n'', and ``o'' are also allowed.) If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual, giving preference to commands over library subroutines, and displays the first manual page it finds, if any. If the -a option is supplied, man displays all applicable manual pages.

Normally man checks in standard locations (/usr/man and /usr/local/man) for manual information. This can be changed by supplying a search path (a la the Bourne shell) with the -M flag. The search path is a colon (``:'') separated list of directories in which man expects to find the standard manual subdirectories. This search path can also be set with the environmental variable MANPATH.

Since some manual pages are intended for use only on certain machines, man only searches those directories applicable to the current machine. Man's determination of the current machine type can be overridden by setting the environmental variable MACHINE.

If the standard output is a teletype, and the - flag is not provided, man uses more(1), or the pager provided by the environmental variable PAGER, to display the manual page.

The FORTRAN version of section 3 of the manual may be specified by supplying man with the section ``3f''. Also, a specific section of the local manual may be specified by appending a number to the section, i.e. ``l5'' would indicate section 5 of the local manual.

FILES
/usr/man	standard manual area
/usr/man/cat?/*	directories containing standard manual pages
/usr/local/man/cat?/*	directories containing local manual pages
/usr/src/man	directories containing unformatted manual pages

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), more(1), whatis(1), whereis(1)

BUGS
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter or on a typewriter, however, on a typewriter, some information is necessarily lost.