man - format and display the on-line manual pages


Usage

man [OPTIONS]

man formats and displays the on-line manual pages. If you specify section, man only looks in that section of the manual. name is normally the name of the manual page, which is typically the name of a command, function, or file.


-k

Searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords. You can use this to find the name of the command, which you can do a man on for more detailed help.

[dan@D11014490 ~]$ man -k compiler
B                    (3pm)  - The Perl Compiler
B::Bytecode          (3pm)  - Perl compiler's bytecode backend
B::C                 (3pm)  - Perl compiler's C backend
B::CC                (3pm)  - Perl compiler's optimized C translation backend
B::Deparse           (3pm)  - Perl compiler backend to produce perl code
O                    (3pm)  - Generic interface to Perl Compiler backends
compile_et           (1)  - error table compiler
cups-config          (3)  - get cups api, compiler, directory, and link information
f4rpcgen [rpcgen]    (1)  - an RPC protocol compiler
g77                  (1)  - GNU project Fortran 77 compiler
gcc                  (1)  - GNU project C and C++ compiler
gcj                  (1)  - Ahead-of-time compiler for the Java language
idlj                 (1)  - The IDL-to-Java Compiler (RMI-IIOP version)
less                 (3pm)  - perl pragma to request less of something from the compiler
mk_cmds              (1)  - error table compiler
perlcompile          (1)  - Introduction to the Perl Compiler-Translator
tic                  (1m)  - the terminfo entry-description compiler
widl                 (1)  - Wine Interface Definition Language Compiler
wrc                  (1)  - Wine Resource Compiler
wrc [wmc]            (1)  - Wine Message Compiler
xsubpp               (1)  - compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code
zic                  (8)  - time zone compiler
[dan@D11014490 ~]$

Daniel J. Hood
Last modified: Thu Sep 30 11:03:14 EDT 2004