3 .\" Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, John W. Eaton.
5 .\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public
6 .\" License as specified in the README file that comes with the man 1.0
10 .\" jwe@che.utexas.edu
11 .\" Department of Chemical Engineering
12 .\" The University of Texas at Austin
13 .\" Austin, Texas 78712
15 .\" $FreeBSD: src/gnu/usr.bin/man/man/man.man,v 1.10.2.8 2002/06/25 00:02:55 eric Exp $
16 .\" $DragonFly: src/gnu/usr.bin/man/man/man.man,v 1.2 2003/06/17 04:25:46 dillon Exp $
23 .Nd format and display the on-line manual pages
36 formats and displays the on-line manual pages. This version knows
41 environment variables, so you can have
42 your own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you
43 like to display the formatted pages. If section is specified,
45 only looks in that section of the manual. You may also specify the
46 order to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to
47 run on the source files via command line options or environment
48 variables. If enabled by the system administrator, formatted man
49 pages will also be compressed with the `%compress%' command to save
52 The options are as follows:
55 Specify an alternate manpath.
60 (which is built into the
63 to determine the path to search. This option overrides the
67 Specify which pager to use.
72 This option overrides the
76 List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search.
77 This option overrides the
83 will exit after displaying the first manual page it
84 finds. Using this option forces
86 to display all the manual pages
91 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging
97 Print a help message and exit.
102 As some manual pages are intended only for specific architectures,
104 searches any subdirectories,
105 with the same name as the current architecture,
106 in every directory which it searches.
107 Machine specific areas are checked before general areas.
108 The current machine type may be overridden using this option
109 or by setting the environment variable
111 to the name of a specific architecture.
112 This option overrides the
114 environment variable.
116 Look for original, non-localized manpages only.
120 searches for a localized manpage
121 in a set of locale subdirectories of each
125 Locale name is taken from the first of three environment variables
126 with a nonempty value:
127 .Ev LC_ALL , LC_CTYPE ,
130 in the specified order.
132 If the value could not be determined, or is not a valid locale name,
133 then only non-localized manpage will be looked up.
137 will search in the following subdirectories, in the order of precedence:
139 .Bl -item -offset indent -compact
142 .Pa <lang> _ <country> . <charset>
144 .Pa <lang> . <charset>
154 will search in the following subdirectories of the
158 .Bl -item -offset indent -compact
160 .Pa /usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO8859-1
162 .Pa /usr/share/man/de.ISO8859-1
164 .Pa /usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1
168 if the search of localized manpage fails,
169 it will be looked up in the default
173 Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff.
174 Not all installations will have a full set of preprocessors.
175 Some of the preprocessors and the letters used to designate them are:
176 eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), refer (r).
177 This option overrides the
179 environment variable.
183 to format the manual page, passing the output to stdout.
186 may need to be passed through some filter or another before being
189 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print the location(s) of
190 the files that would be formatted or displayed.
193 .Bl -tag -width MANROFFSEQ
194 .It Ev LC_ALL , LC_CTYPE , LANG
195 These variables specify the preferred language for manual pages.
202 is set, its value is used to override the current machine type
203 when searching machine specific subdirectories.
207 is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.
211 is set, its value is used to determine the set of preprocessors run
212 before running nroff or troff. By default, pages are passed through
213 the table preprocessor before nroff.
217 is set, its value is used to determine which manual sections to search.
221 is set, its value is used as the name of the program to use to display
222 the man page. By default,
228 Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for getopt,
233 However, when referring to a specific section of the manual,
250 option only works if the
252 program is installed.