Difference between revisions of "Man"
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Revision as of 09:18, 16 March 2011
The man command on the console is a powerful and quick way to get the finer details about commands, macros and programming interfaces.
The man system is partitioned in 9 sections. You call man like this:
$ man [section] title
where section is optional and if used one of the following sections and title is the command/function/... you are searching for.
The manual sections are traditionally defined as follows:
- Commands
- Those commands that can be executed by the user from within a shell.
- System calls
- Those functions which must be performed by the kernel.
- Library calls
- Most of the libc functions, such as qsort(3))
- Special files
- Files found in /dev)
- File formats and conventions
- The format for /etc/passwd and other human-readable files.
- Games
- Macro packages and conventions
- A description of the standard file system layout, network protocols, ASCII and other character codes, this man page, and other things.
- System management commands
- Commands like mount(8), many of which only root can execute.
- Kernel routines
- This is an obsolete manual section. Once it was thought a good idea to document the Linux kernel here, but in fact very little has been documented, and the documentation that exists is outdated already. There are better sources of information for kernel developers.
Apropos is a utility to inspire you to find the right command.
$ apropos network
this command will search through the manual pages for the word network and list appropriate commands/functions/...
If you are programming kernel modules there are, as mentioned above under 9, not much help to find in the manual pages. You can get inform about the kernel API here