man - display a program’s manual page.
man program # program is the name of the command
On most Linux systems, man uses less to display manual page.
The manual that man displays is broken into sections and covers not only user commands but also system administration commands, programming interfaces, file formats and more.
Man page organization:
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
1 | user commands |
2 | programming interfaces for kernel system calls |
3 | programming interfaces to the C library |
4 | special files such as device nodes and drivers |
5 | file formats |
6 | games and amusements such as screen savers |
7 | Miscellaneous |
8 | System administration commands |
9 | Obscure kernel specs and interfaces |
man section search_item
man 5 passwd
Refer to a specific section of the manual to find what we are looking for.
man -kwill perform the same asapropos.
If our system has additional man pages, we can rebuild this file with makewhatis (Red Hat and FreeBSD) or mandb (Ubuntu).
Extra
Tools to use alongside man pages
apropos