HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 1 User Commands A-M (vol 1)

m
man(1) man(1)
NAME
man - find manpage information by keywords; print out a manpage
SYNOPSIS
man [-M path] -k
keyword...
man [-M path] -f
file...
man [-][-M path][
-T macro-package][section[subsection]] entry_name...
DESCRIPTION
man accesses information from the HP-UX manpages. It can be used to:
• List all manpages whose one-line description contains any of a specified set of keywords.
• Display or print one-line descriptions of manpages specified by name.
• Search on-line manpage directories by manpage name and display or print the specified manpages.
• Search a specified on-line manpage section (directory) and display or print the specified manpages in
that section.
Searching for Entry Names by Keyword (first form)
The first form above searches the one-line descriptions of individual manpages for specified keywords.
Arguments are as follows:
-k keyword -k followed by one or more keywords causes man to print the one-line description of
each manpage whose one-line description contains text matching one or more of the
specified keywords (similar to the behavior of grep(1)). Keywords are separated by
blanks (space or tab).
Before this option can be used, file /usr/share/lib/whatis
must exist.
/usr/share/lib/whatis
can be created by running catman(1M).
Obtaining One-Line Description of an Entry (second form)
The second form above finds and displays or prints the one-line descriptions of specified individual man-
pages. Arguments are as follows:
-f file -f followed by one or more file names causes man to print the one-line description of
each manpage found whose name matches file. When specifying two or more files, file
arguments are separated by blanks (space or tab). If manpage names matching file
exist in two or more sections, the one-line description of each matched file name is
output.
Before this option can be used, file
/usr/share/lib/whatis
must exist.
/usr/share/lib/whatis
can be created by running catman(1M).
Viewing Individual Manpages (third form)
The third form shown above is used for viewing one or more individual manpages.
man in this form
recognizes the following arguments:
- (optional) When the - argument is present, man sends the formatted manpage
directly to standard output without processing it through the output filter specified by
the PAGER environment variable.
-M path Change the search path for manpages. path is a colon-separated list of directories
that contain manpage directory subtrees. When used with the -k or -f options, the
-M option must appear first.
-T macro-package
man uses macro-package rather than the standard -man macros defined in
/usr/share/lib/tmac/tmac.an for formatting manpages.
When specifying the -T option to man , the full path must be given. For example:
man -T /usr/share/lib/tmac/tmac.s ls
section[subsection]
(optional) Search in the specified section for the given entry_name. section specifies a
single section number or one of the words local, new, old,orpublic to search
HP-UX 11i Version 3: February 2007 − 1 − Hewlett-Packard Company 647