UNIX "man" Pages

For UNIX Help Go to the "man" Pages

The man pages are UNIX on-line help. They contain almost everything to define how UNIX works, but are often terse, precise, and obscure. Examples are rare. Some topics are difficult to find because they are features of a shell program, such as the else command of the ksh shell, rather than functions of basic UNIX itself.

The man pages are divided into sections and the same topic can occur in several sections of the man pages. The sections are based on historical accident and are not that consistent.

Within man use the Spacebar to see the next page and "Q" to stop (Space and "Q" work in most UNIX tools, also "/" to search for a string using a regular expression).

Text version.

% man man {find out more about the man command}
% man ls {display entry for the ls command}
% man stty {display entry for "stty" in section 1}
% man 7 stty {display "stty" entry in section 7}
% man -k stty {display all entries with the word "stty"}

Use man -k to list man page descriptions that contain a keyword. You must have a man page index (/usr/lib/whatis on HP-UX 9.0 and /usr/share/lib/whatis on HP-UX 10.0) which is created by logging on as root (superuser) and then doing catman -w. The catman command takes a long time to run, so we suggest that you run it in the background (&).

% man man	{find out more about the man command}
% man ls	{display entry for the ls command}
% man stty	{display entry for "stty" in section 1}
% man 7 stty	{display "stty" entry in section 7}
% man -k stty	{display all entries with the word "stty"}