MAN(1)

📦
version 2.13.1 · 12 versions
, in debian trixie, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

📖 MAN(1) ✨ Manual pager utils ✨ MAN(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so the name of this thing is man, and it's basically your gateway to the system reference manuals 📚 bestie, it's literally an interface to all the official docs 💖

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

man [man options] [[section] page ...] ...
man -k [apropos options] regexp ...
man -K [man options] [section] term ...
man -f [whatis options] page ...
man -l [man options] file ...
man -w|-W [man options] page ...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so man is the system's manual pager 💅 You give it a page argument, which is usually the name of a program, utility, or function, and it goes and finds the manual page for that thing and shows it to you. ✨

You can also give it a section, if you want. That tells man to only look in that one section of the manual 🧚 Without one, it searches all the available sections following a pre-defined order (see DEFAULTS 👑) and shows you only the first page it finds. Even if the page exists in several sections, you only get one, so no double-dipping 🙈

The table below shows the section numbers of the manual and the types of pages they hold. Lowkey the most useful thing to memorise 🍓

  • 1 — Executable programs or shell commands 🔥
  • 2 — System calls (functions provided by the kernel) 💜
  • 3 — Library calls (functions within program libraries) 🌈
  • 4 — Special files (usually found in /dev) ⭐
  • 5 — File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd 🫶
  • 6 — Games 🎮
  • 7 — Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7), man-pages(7) 💖
  • 8 — System administration commands (usually only for root) 💀
  • 9 — Kernel routines [Non standard] 🙈

A manual page is made up of several sections, kind of like a playlist of info 🎀

Conventional section names include NAME, SYNOPSIS, CONFIGURATION, DESCRIPTION, OPTIONS, EXIT STATUS, RETURN VALUE, ERRORS, ENVIRONMENT, FILES, VERSIONS, STANDARDS, NOTES, BUGS, EXAMPLE, AUTHORS, and SEE ALSO ✨

The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section, and you can use them as a guide in other sections too 💅

  • bold text — type exactly as shown.
  • italic text — replace with the appropriate argument.
  • [-abc] — any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
  • -a|-b — options delimited by | cannot be used together.
  • argument ... — argument is repeatable.
  • [expression] ... — the entire expression within [ ] is repeatable.

Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device. For instance, man will usually not be able to render italics when running in a terminal, and will typically use underlined or coloured text instead 🌸

The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all possible invocations. In some cases it is advisable to illustrate several exclusive invocations, as is shown in the SYNOPSIS section of this manual page 🦋

🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

bestie, this is the fun part 🤩 here are the examples, served fresh:

man ls

Display the manual page for the item (program) ls. 💖

man man.7

Display the manual page for macro package man from section 7. (This is an alternative spelling of "man 7 man".) ✨

man 'man(7)'

Display the manual page for macro package man from section 7. (This is another alternative spelling of "man 7 man". It may be more convenient when copying and pasting cross-references to manual pages. Note that the parentheses must normally be quoted to protect them from the shell.) 🧚

man -a intro

Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them. 🌈

man -t bash | lpr -Pps

Format the manual page for bash into the default troff or groff format and pipe it to the printer named ps. The default output for groff is usually PostScript. man --help should advise as to which processor is bound to the -t option. 🖨️

man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi

This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page ./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi) file. The redirection is necessary, as the -T flag causes output to be directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a program such as xdvi, or further processed into PostScript using a program such as dvips. 💅

man -k printf

Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf as a regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to apropos printf. 🔥

man -f smail

Look up the manual pages referenced by smail and print out the short descriptions of any found. Equivalent to whatis smail. 🫶

🧚 OVERVIEW 🧚

okay so there are so many options available to man, giving you as much flexibility as possible 💜 You can change the search path, section order, output processor, and other behaviours and operations detailed below. Main character energy 👑

If they're set, various environment variables get interrogated to determine how man operates 🌸 You can set the "catch-all" variable $MANOPT to any string in command line format, with one exception: any spaces used as part of an option's argument must be escaped (preceded by a backslash) 🙈 man will parse $MANOPT before parsing its own command line. Options that require an argument will be overridden by the same options found on the command line. To reset all of the options set in $MANOPT, -D can be specified as the initial command line option. This lets man "forget" about the options specified in $MANOPT, although they must still have been valid when set ✨

Manual pages are normally stored in nroff(1) format under a directory such as /usr/share/man. In some installations there may also be preformatted cat pages to improve performance. See manpath(5) for details of where these files are stored 📚

This package supports manual pages in multiple languages, controlled by your locale 🌍 If your system didn't set this up for you automatically, you may need to set $LC_MESSAGES, $LANG, or another system-dependent environment variable to indicate your preferred locale. This is usually specified in the POSIX format:

<language>[_<territory>[.<character-set>[,<version>]]]

If the desired page is available in your locale, it will be displayed in lieu of the standard (usually American English) page 🎀

If you find that the translations supplied with this package aren't available in your native language, and you'd like to supply them, please contact the maintainer, who will be coordinating that activity 🫶

Individual manual pages are normally written and maintained by the maintainers of the program, function, or other topic they document, and they are not included with this package. If you find that a manual page is missing or inadequate, please report that to the maintainers of the package in question 💌

For information regarding other features and extensions available with this manual pager, please read the documents supplied with the package 🦋

👑 DEFAULTS 👑

The order of sections to search may be overridden by the environment variable $MANSECT, or by the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config. By default it is as follows:

1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 3posix 3pm 3perl 3am 5 4 9 6 7

The formatted manual page is displayed using a pager. This can be specified in a number of ways, or else it will fall back to a default (see option -P for details) 💖

The filters are deciphered by a number of means. Firstly, the command line option -p or the environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is interrogated. If -p was not used and the environment variable was not set, the initial line of the nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string. To contain a valid preprocessor string, the first line must resemble:

'\" <string>

where string can be any combination of letters described by option -p below ✨

If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default set is used 🌸

A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary formatter (nroff, or [tg]roff with -t) and executed. Alternatively, if an executable program mandb_nfmt (or mandb_tfmt with -t) exists in the man tree root, it is executed instead. It gets passed the manual source file, the preprocessor string, and optionally the device specified with -T or -E as arguments 🧚

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

okay bestie, listen up 👂 Non-argument options that are duplicated, either on the command line, in $MANOPT, or both, are totally harmless 🫶 For options that do require an argument, each duplication will override the previous argument value.

💜 General options 💜

  • -C file, --config-file=file — Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath. 🌈
  • -d, --debug — Print debugging information. 🔍
  • -D, --default — This option is normally issued as the very first option, and it resets man's behaviour to its default. Its whole job is to reset those options that may have been set in $MANOPT. Any options that follow -D will have their usual effect. 🔄
  • --warnings[=warnings] — Enable warnings from groff. This can be used to perform sanity checks on the source text of manual pages. warnings is a comma-separated list of warning names; if it isn't supplied, the default is "mac". To disable a groff warning, prefix it with "!": for example, --warnings=mac,!break enables warnings in the "mac" category and disables warnings in the "break" category. See the “Warnings” node in info groff for a list of available warning names. ⚠️

🔥 Main modes of operation 🔥

  • -f, --whatis — Approximately equivalent to whatis. Displays a short description from the manual page, if one is available. See whatis(1) for details. ✨
  • -k, --apropos — Approximately equivalent to apropos. Searches the short manual page descriptions for keywords and displays any matches. See apropos(1) for details. 🔎
  • -K, --global-apropos — Searches for text in all manual pages. This is a brute-force search and is likely to take some time, so if you can, specify a section to reduce the number of pages that need to be searched. Search terms may be simple strings (the default), or regular expressions if the --regex option is used. 💀
heads up bestie: this searches the sources of the manual pages, not the rendered text. That means it may include false positives due to things like comments in source files, or false negatives due to things like hyphens being written as "\-" in source files. Searching the rendered text would be much slower 🙈
  • -l, --local-file — Activate "local" mode. Format and display local manual files instead of searching through the system's manual collection 🧁 Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source file in the correct format. No cat file is produced. If '-' is listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from stdin 📥

Okay so the -l business from before is still going, and it's giving "fallback" 🦋

If this option isn't used, man will also fall back to treating page arguments as local file names whenever the argument contains a / character 🗂️ bestie, that slash is basically a neon sign saying "this is a path on the file system" ✨

  • -w, --where, --path, --location — okay so this one doesn't actually show you the page 🙈 it just prints the location of the source nroff file that would've been formatted. If you also throw in -a, it prints the locations of all source files that match your search 🔍💜
  • -W, --where-cat, --location-cat — same energy as -w, but for the preformatted cat file that would've been displayed 📄 With -a you get the locations of every preformatted cat file that matches 🌸
  • Now the combo moment 🫶 If you use -w and -W together, you get both the source file and the cat file, separated by a space. And if you use all of -w, -W, and -a at once, it does this for each possible match. Iconic, honestly 👑
  • -c, --catman — not for general use, bestie 🙅‍♀️ This one's only meant for the catman program, so please don't go poking it for fun 💀
  • -R encoding, --recode=encoding — instead of formatting the page the usual way, this outputs its source converted to the encoding you specify 🌈 If you already know the source file's encoding, you can use manconv(1) directly. BUT this option is the move if you want to convert a bunch of pages to one encoding without stating each one's encoding, as long as they're already installed in something shaped like a manual page hierarchy ✨
  • Quick heads up 💅 For converting multiple manual pages, man-recode(1) is the better pick. It has an interface built for bulk conversion, so it can be way faster 🏎️💨

🦋 Finding manual pages 🦋

  • -L locale, --locale=locale — normally man figures out your current locale by calling the C function setlocale(3), which checks various environment variables (possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG) 🌍 If you want to temporarily override that, pass a locale string straight to man with this option. It won't kick in until the page search actually begins, though 🕐 And output like the help message always shows up in the locale that was figured out at the start 💖
  • -m system[,...], --systems=system[,...] — if your system can access other operating systems' manual pages, this is how you reach them 🧚 To search NewOS's manual page collection, use -m NewOS. You can list several operating system names separated by commas, and to include a search of the native operating system's pages, add the system name man to the argument string 🫶 This option overrides the $SYSTEM environment variable, so it wins that fight 👑
  • -M path, --manpath=path — lets you pick an alternate manpath to use 🗺️ By default, man uses manpath-derived code to figure out which path to search. This option overrides the $MANPATH environment variable AND makes -m get ignored. Rude, but effective 💀

A path given as a manpath has to be the root of a manual page hierarchy that's structured into sections, just like the man-db manual describes (look for "The manual page system") 📚 Want to view pages that live outside those hierarchies? Check out the -l option ✨

  • -S list, -s list, --sections=list — the list is a colon- or comma-separated list of sections that decides which manual sections get searched and in what order 🎀 This overrides the $MANSECT environment variable. (The -s spelling is only there for compatibility with System V, so it's a bit of a throwback 🕰️)
  • -e sub-extension, --extension=sub-extension — okay this one has a whole story 📖 Some systems stuff big packages of manual pages, like the ones that come with the Tcl package, into the main hierarchy. So to avoid two pages sharing a name like exit(3), the Tcl pages were usually all dumped into section l. Unfortunate, honestly 😭 Now it's possible to put them in the correct section and give them a specific "extension", like exit(3tcl). By default, man shows exit(3) in preference to exit(3tcl). So to get the Tcl one without needing to know which section it lives in, give man a sub-extension string for the package. Using the example above, -e tcl restricts the search to pages with an extension of *tcl 💅
  • -i, --ignore-case — ignores case when searching for pages. This is the default, so you're already doing it 🌸
  • -I, --match-case — searches case-sensitively 🔤
  • --regex — shows all pages where any part of the name or the description matches each page argument as a regular expression, same as apropos(1) 🔍 Since there's usually no reasonable way to pick a "best" page for a regex search, this option implies -a 🫶
  • --wildcard — same vibe as --regex, but uses shell-style wildcards, same as apropos(1) --wildcard 🧚 The page argument has to match the entire name or description, or match on word boundaries in the description. And just like --regex, this one implies -a because there's no obvious "best" page for a wildcard either 💖
  • --names-only — if you're using --regex or --wildcard, this matches only page names and skips descriptions, same as whatis(1) ✨ Otherwise it does nothing, so don't stress 🙈
  • -a, --all — by default, man exits after showing the most suitable page it finds 🏁 With this option, it shows all the manual pages whose names match your search criteria 🌈
  • -u, --update — makes man update its database caches of installed manual pages 🛠️ This is only needed in rare situations, and it's usually better to run mandb(8) instead 💜
  • --no-subpages — okay this is a lowkey clever one 🧠 By default, man treats a pair of manual page names on the command line as equivalent to a single page name containing a hyphen or an underscore. This is for programs with a bunch of subcommands, so each one can have its own page that you look up with the same syntax you'd use to run the subcommand itself. For example:
$ man -aw git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git-diff.1.gz

To turn that behaviour off, use --no-subpages 🙅‍♀️

$ man -aw --no-subpages git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/Git.3pm.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/diff.1.gz

🎀 Controlling formatted output 🎀

  • -P pager, --pager=pager — picks the output pager 📄 By default, man uses pager, but falls back to cat if pager isn't found or isn't executable 🐱 This option overrides the $MANPAGER environment variable, which in turn overrides the $PAGER environment variable. It's not used with -f or -k 🙈

The value can be a simple command name or a command with arguments, and it can use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes) ✨ BUT it can't use pipes to connect multiple commands. If you need that, make a wrapper script instead. The script can take the file to display either as an argument or on standard input 🫶

  • -r prompt, --prompt=prompt — if you're using a recent version of less as your pager, man will try to set its prompt and some sensible options for you 🌸 The default prompt looks like this:

Manual page name(sec) line x

Where name is the manual page name, sec is the section it was found under, and x is the current line number 🔢 This is achieved by using the $LESS environment variable 💅

Supplying -r with a string overrides that default 🌈 The string can include the text $MAN_PN, which gets expanded to the name of the current manual page, plus its section name wrapped in ( and ). The string used to make the default could be written like this:

\ Manual\ page\ \$MAN_PN\ ?ltline\ %lt?L/%L.:
byte\ %bB?s/%s..?\ (END):?pB\ %pB\\%..
(press h for help or q to quit)

It's split into three lines here just for readability ✨ For what it all means, see the less(1) manual page 📖 The prompt string gets evaluated by the shell first, so all double quotes, backquotes and backslashes in the prompt must be escaped with a preceding backslash 🙏 The prompt string may end in an escaped $, which can be followed by more options for less. By default, man sets the -ix8 options 💖

The $MANLESS environment variable (described below) can set a default prompt string if you don't supply one on the command line. Choose wisely, bestie 👑
  • -7, --ascii — when you're viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7-bit terminal or terminal emulator, some characters might not display correctly when using the latin1(7) device description with GNU nroff 😭 This option lets pure ascii pages display in ascii with the latin1 device. It won't translate any latin1 text, though 🙅‍♀️ Here's the table of translations it performs. Some parts might only display properly with GNU nroff's latin1(7) device:
Description           Octal   latin1   ascii
─────────────────────────────────────────────
continuation hyphen    255      ‐        -
bullet (middle dot)    267      •        o
acute accent           264      ´        '
multiplication sign    327      ×        x

If the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal is probably set up for latin1 characters and you don't need this option 🌈 If the latin1 and ascii columns are identical, then you're either reading this page using this option, or man didn't format it with the latin1 device description 🤔 And if the latin1 column is missing or corrupt, you might need to view manual pages with this option 🥺

This option is ignored when you use -t, -H, -T, or -Z, and it might be totally useless for nroff unless it's GNU's 🙄✨

  • -E encoding, --encoding=encoding: okay so this one makes output for a character encoding that isn't the default 💖 For backward compatibility, encoding can be an nroff device like ascii, latin1, or utf8, or a real character encoding like UTF-8. Both work bestie 🫶
  • --no-hyphenation, --nh: so normally nroff will hyphenate words at line breaks, even words with no hyphens in them, if it needs to so the line doesn't look gappy 📏 This option turns that off, so words only get hyphenated if they already have hyphens in them 🦋

If you're writing a manual page and just want to stop nroff from hyphenating a word in a weird spot, don't use this flag 🙅‍♀️ Check the nroff docs instead. For example, you can put "\%" inside a word to say where it's allowed to break, or put "\%" at the start of a word so it never gets hyphenated 💅

  • --no-justification, --nj: normally nroff pushes text out to both margins so it's perfectly lined up on both sides 📐 This option turns off full justification and keeps only the left margin lined up, which is what people call "ragged-right" text 🎀

Same deal as before: if you only want certain paragraphs to stop being justified, skip this flag and read the nroff docs. You can use the .na, .nf, .fi, and .ad requests to turn adjusting and filling off temporarily ✨

  • -p string, --preprocessor=string: this sets which preprocessors run before nroff or troff/groff 🧚 Not every setup has the full set, so don't be shocked if some are missing. The ones you might see, with their letters, are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), and refer (r) 📚 This option overrides the $MANROFFSEQ environment variable, and zsoelim always runs first no matter what 👑
  • -t, --troff: formats the manual page with groff -mandoc and sends it to stdout 🖨️ You don't need this flag if you're already using -H, -T, or -Z 💜
  • -T[device], --troff-device[=device]: changes groff's output (or possibly troff's) so it's suitable for a device that isn't the default 📱 It implies -t. Some examples as of groff 1.23.0 are dvi, latin1, pdf, ps, utf8, X75, and X100 🌈
  • -H[browser], --html[=browser]: makes groff produce HTML and then shows it in a web browser 🌐 The browser gets picked by the optional browser argument if you give one, otherwise by the $BROWSER environment variable, and if that's unset, by a compile-time default (usually lynx). This option implies -t and only works with GNU troff 🦋
  • -X[dpi], --gxditview[=dpi]: shows groff's output in a graphical window using the gxditview program 🪟 The dpi (dots per inch) can be 75, 75-12, 100, or 100-12, and it defaults to 75. The -12 versions use a 12-point base font. This option implies -T with the X75, X75-12, X100, or X100-12 device, depending on what you pick 🔥
  • -Z, --ditroff: groff runs troff, then uses a suitable post-processor to make output for the device you chose 🫧 If groff -mandoc is groff, this option gets passed along to groff and stops the post-processor from running. It implies -t 💀

💬 Getting help

  • -?, --help: prints a help message and exits 🙋‍♀️
  • --usage: prints a short usage message and exits 📝
  • -V, --version: displays version info 🏷️

🚦 EXIT STATUS 🚦

  • 0: everything went perfectly, successful program execution 🥳
  • 1: usage, syntax, or configuration file error 🙈
  • 2: operational error 😬
  • 3: a child process returned a non-zero exit status 💀
  • 16: at least one of the pages, files, or keywords didn't exist or didn't get matched 🫠

🌍 ENVIRONMENT 🌍

  • MANPATH: if $MANPATH is set, its value is the path man searches for manual pages 🗺️ See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default behaviour and the full details on how this variable is handled 💅
  • MANROFFOPT: every time man calls the formatter (nroff, troff, or groff), it adds the contents of $MANROFFOPT to the formatter's command line ⚙️ For example, MANROFFOPT=-P-i tells the formatter to use italic text (only some terminals support that) instead of underlined text 🌸
  • MANROFFSEQ: if $MANROFFSEQ is set, its value decides which preprocessors each manual page goes through 🧩 The default preprocessor list depends on the system 🖥️
  • MANSECT: if $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections, and it decides which manual sections get searched and in what order 📑 The default is "1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 3posix 3pm 3perl 3am 5 4 9 6 7", unless the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config overrides it 🫶
  • MANPAGER, PAGER: if $MANPAGER or $PAGER is set ($MANPAGER wins if both are), its value is the program used to display the manual page 📖 By default it's pager, and it falls back to cat if pager isn't found or isn't executable 🐈

The value can be a plain command name or a command with arguments, and it can use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes) 🧵 It can't use pipes to connect multiple commands. If you need that, use a wrapper script instead, which can take the file to display either as an argument or on standard input 🎀

  • MANLESS: if $MANLESS is set, its value becomes the default prompt string for the less pager, just as if you'd passed it with the -r option, so any $MAN_PN text gets expanded the same way 🪄 For example, if you want the prompt to be “my prompt string” no matter what, set $MANLESS to -Psmy prompt string 💖 Using the -r option overrides this environment variable 🙌
  • BROWSER: if $BROWSER is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of commands. Each one gets tried in turn to start a web browser for man --html 🌐 In each command, %s gets replaced by a filename holding the HTML output from groff, %% gets replaced by a single percent sign (%), and %c gets replaced by a colon (:) 🫧
  • SYSTEM: if $SYSTEM is set, it does the exact same thing as if you'd passed it as the argument to the -m option 🧃
  • MANOPT: if $MANOPT is set, it gets parsed before man's command line and should look kind of similar to it 🍓 All the other man-specific environment variables can be written as command line options, so they're all candidates to go into $MANOPT, which means they'll probably become obsolete 👋 N.B. every space that's meant to be part of an option's argument must be escaped 🚨
  • MANWIDTH: if $MANWIDTH is set, its value is the line length manual pages get formatted to 📏 If it isn't set, pages get formatted to a line length that suits your current terminal, using $COLUMNS, plus ioctl(2) if it's available, and falling back to 80 characters if neither works 💻 Cat pages only get saved when the default formatting can be used, which is when the terminal line length is between 66 and 80 characters 🧠
  • MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING: normally, when output isn't going to a terminal (like a file or a pipe), formatting characters get tossed so the result is easy to read without special tools 🧹 But if $MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING is set to any non-empty value, those formatting characters stay put. This can be handy for wrappers around man that know how to interpret them 🔍
  • MAN_KEEP_STDERR: normally, when output is going to a terminal (usually a pager), any error output from the command that makes the formatted pages gets thrown away so it doesn't mess up the pager's display 🙊 Programs like groff often spit out minor complaints about typography, like poor alignment, which look messy next to the page. But some people want to see them anyway, so if $MAN_KEEP_STDERR is set to any non-empty value, error output shows up as usual 👀
  • MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP: on Linux, man normally puts subprocesses that handle untrusted data inside a seccomp(2) sandbox 🛡️ That makes it way safer to run complex parsing code over random manual pages. If this breaks for some reason that has nothing to do with the page's content, you can set $MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP to any non-empty value to turn the sandbox off 🔓
  • PIPELINE_DEBUG: if $PIPELINE_DEBUG is set to "1", man prints debugging messages to standard error describing every subprocess it runs 🔎
  • LANG, LC_MESSAGES: depending on the system and implementation, either or both of $LANG and $LC_MESSAGES get checked for the current message locale 🌏 man shows its messages in that locale if it's available. See setlocale(3) for the precise details 🧚‍♀️

📁 FILES 📁

  • /etc/manpath.config: the man-db configuration file 🗂️
  • /usr/share/man: a global manual page hierarchy 🌸

📜 STANDARDS 📜

POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, and POSIX.1-2017 ✨

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

apropos(1), groff(1), less(1), manpath(1), nroff(1), troff(1), whatis(1), zsoelim(1), manpath(5), man(7), catman(8), mandb(8) 💜

Documentation for some packages may also be available in other formats, like info(1) or HTML 🫶

🕰️ HISTORY 🕰️

okay so this is the lore 📜 of how man-db came to be, and it's kinda iconic ngl 💅

1990, 1991 – it was originally written by John W. Eaton, email jwe@che.utexas.edu. the OG 🫶

Dec 23 1992: Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) applied bug fixes that Willem Kasdorp (wkasdo@nikhefk.nikef.nl) had supplied. literally a team effort 🥹

30th April 1994 – 23rd February 2000: Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk) kept developing and maintaining this package, with some dedicated people helping out. such a ride-or-die era ✨

30th October 1996 – 30th March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco (<fpolacco@debian.org>) maintained and enhanced this package for the Debian project, with help from the whole community. the glow-up is real 🌈

31st March 2001 – present day: Colin Watson (<cjwatson@debian.org>) is now the one developing and maintaining man-db. current queen of the codebase 👑

🐛 BUGS 🐛

if something's acting up, you can spill the tea at these places bestie 🫠

ok that's the whole page!! thanks for hanging with me through all of it 🫶💖 stay curious, stay caffeinated, and keep being the most iconic Unix girlie in the group chat 💅🦋 version 2.13.1, last updated 2025-05-02 🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from