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 $
22 .Nd format and display the on-line manual pages
35 formats and displays the on-line manual pages. This version knows
40 environment variables, so you can have
41 your own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you
42 like to display the formatted pages. If section is specified,
44 only looks in that section of the manual. You may also specify the
45 order to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to
46 run on the source files via command line options or environment
47 variables. If enabled by the system administrator, formatted man
48 pages will also be compressed with the `%compress%' command to save
51 The options are as follows:
54 Specify an alternate manpath.
59 (which is built into the
62 to determine the path to search. This option overrides the
66 Specify which pager to use.
71 This option overrides the
75 List is a colon separated list of manual sections to search.
76 This option overrides the
82 will exit after displaying the first manual page it
83 finds. Using this option forces
85 to display all the manual pages
90 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging
96 Print a help message and exit.
101 As some manual pages are intended only for specific architectures,
103 searches any subdirectories,
104 with the same name as the current architecture,
105 in every directory which it searches.
106 Machine specific areas are checked before general areas.
107 The current machine type may be overridden using this option
108 or by setting the environment variable
110 to the name of a specific architecture.
111 This option overrides the
113 environment variable.
115 Look for original, non-localized manpages only.
119 searches for a localized manpage
120 in a set of locale subdirectories of each
124 Locale name is taken from the first of three environment variables
125 with a nonempty value:
126 .Ev LC_ALL , LC_CTYPE ,
129 in the specified order.
131 If the value could not be determined, or is not a valid locale name,
132 then only non-localized manpage will be looked up.
136 will search in the following subdirectories, in the order of precedence:
138 .Bl -item -offset indent -compact
141 .Pa <lang> _ <country> . <charset>
143 .Pa <lang> . <charset>
153 will search in the following subdirectories of the
157 .Bl -item -offset indent -compact
159 .Pa /usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO8859-1
161 .Pa /usr/share/man/de.ISO8859-1
163 .Pa /usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1
167 if the search of localized manpage fails,
168 it will be looked up in the default
172 Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff.
173 Not all installations will have a full set of preprocessors.
174 Some of the preprocessors and the letters used to designate them are:
175 eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), refer (r).
176 This option overrides the
178 environment variable.
182 to format the manual page, passing the output to stdout.
185 may need to be passed through some filter or another before being
188 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print the location(s) of
189 the files that would be formatted or displayed.
192 .Bl -tag -width MANROFFSEQ
193 .It Ev LC_ALL , LC_CTYPE , LANG
194 These variables specify the preferred language for manual pages.
201 is set, its value is used to override the current machine type
202 when searching machine specific subdirectories.
206 is set, its value is used as the path to search for manual pages.
210 is set, its value is used to determine the set of preprocessors run
211 before running nroff or troff. By default, pages are passed through
212 the table preprocessor before nroff.
216 is set, its value is used to determine which manual sections to search.
220 is set, its value is used as the name of the program to use to display
221 the man page. By default,
227 Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for getopt,
232 However, when referring to a specific section of the manual,
249 option only works if the
251 program is installed.