from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Unix manual page
man
man page
Unix man page
<operating system> (Or "man page") A part of {Unix}'s
extensive on-line documentation. To read a manual page, type
man [-s<section>] <page>
at a shell prompt, e.g. "man ftp" (the section number can
usually be omitted). Pages are traditionally referred to
using the notation "page(section)", e.g. ftp(1).
Under {SunOS} (which is fairly typical), Section 1 covers
commands, 2 {system calls}, 3 C library routines, 4 devices
and networks, 5 file formats, 6 games and {demos}, 7
miscellaneous, 8 system administration. Each section has an
introduction which can be obtained with, e.g., "man 2 intro".
Manual pages are stored as {nroff} source files. Formatted
versions are also usually cached.
{Unix manual page}: man(1).
A Linux man gateway (http://foldoc.org/man.cgi).
A Solaris man gateway
(http://medsch.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/pdm/man.pl).
(2000-03-13)