man page
man pages—abbreviation for "manual pages"—are the form of documentation that is available on almost all UNIX-like operating systems, including Arch Linux. The command used to display them is man(1).
In spite of their scope, manual pages are designed to be self-contained documents, consequently limiting themselves to referring to other manual pages when discussing related subjects. This is in sharp contrast with the hyperlink-aware Info documents—GNU attempt at replacing the traditional manual page format.
Installation
man-db implements man on Arch Linux, and less is the default pager used with man. mandoc can also be used.
man-pages provides both the Linux and the POSIX.1 man pages [1].
Some localized man pages are also available:
- man-pages-cs for Czech
- man-pages-da for Danish
- man-pages-de for German
- man-pages-el for Greek
- man-pages-es for Spanish
- man-pages-fi for Finnish
- man-pages-fr for French
- man-pages-hu for Hungarian
- man-pages-id for Indonesian
- man-pages-it for Italian
- man-pages-jaAUR for Japanese
- man-pages-mk for Macedonian
- man-pages-nl for Dutch
- man-pages-pl for Polish
- man-pages-pt_br for Brazilian Portuguese
- man-pages-ro for Romanian
- man-pages-ru for Russian
- man-pages-sr for Serbian
- man-pages-sv for Swedish
- man-pages-trAUR for Turkish
- man-pages-uk for Ukrainian
- man-pages-vi for Vietnamese
- man-pages-zh_cn for Simplified Chinese
- man-pages-zh_tw for Traditional Chinese
You can also search for all of the available localized man pages on the official repositories and on the AUR.
Accessing man pages
To read a man page, simply enter:
$ man page_name
Manuals are sorted into several sections. Each section has an intro, such as intro(1), intro(2) and so on. For a full listing see man-pages(7) § Sections of the manual pages.
Man pages are usually referred to by their name, followed by their section number in parentheses. Often there are multiple man pages of the same name, such as man(1) and man(7). In this case, give man the section number followed by the name of the man page, for example:
$ man 5 passwd
to read the man page on /etc/passwd
, rather than the passwd
utility.
Or equivalently, the man page followed by the section number, separated by a period:
$ man passwd.5
Searching manuals
Man pages can be searched when the exact name of a page is not known using any of the following equivalent commands:
$ man -k expression $ man --apropos expression $ apropos expression
expression
is interpreted as a regular expression by default.
To search for keywords in whole page texts, use the -K
option instead.
man-db.service
which gets periodically triggered by man-db.timer
. If you are getting a "nothing appropriate" message for every search, try manually regenerating the cache by running mandb
as root.One-line descriptions of man pages can be displayed using the whatis
command. For example, for a brief description of the man page sections about ls
, type:
$ whatis ls
ls (1p) - list directory contents ls (1) - list directory contents
Page width
The man page width is controlled by the MANWIDTH
environment variable.
If the number of columns in the terminal is too small (e.g. the window width is narrow), the line breaks will be wrong. This can be very disturbing for reading. You can fix this by setting the MANWIDTH
on man
invocation. With Bash, that would be:
~/.bashrc
man() { local width=$(tput cols) [ $width -gt $MANWIDTH ] && width=$MANWIDTH env MANWIDTH=$width \ man "$@" }
Reading local man pages
You can use some applications to view man pages:
- Emacs — The extensible and self-documenting editor can also be used to read man pages with the built-in M-x
man
command.
- GNOME Help — Help viewer for GNOME. Part of gnome. It can show man pages via
yelp man:<name>
or the undocumentedCtrl+L
keybinding from an existing window.
- KHelpCenter — Application to show KDE Applications' documentation. Part of kde-system. Man pages are in UNIX manual pages or by running
khelpcenter man:<name>
.
- Konqueror — KDE file manager and web browser. It can show man pages via
man:<name>
.
- neovim — The editor can be used to read man pages using the built-in
:Man name
command, or configured as a man pager withexport MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'
. Supports highlighting and navigation between command-line flags, keywords, and other man pages. Automatically generates an outline using section headers, command-line flags, and keywords as entries (available viagO
).
- xman — Provides a categorized look at man pages.
Using browsers such as lynx and Firefox to view man pages allows users to reap info pages' main benefit of hyperlinked text. Alternatives include the following:
Conversion to HTML
mandoc
Install the mandoc package. To convert a page, for example free(1)
:
$ mandoc -Thtml -Ostyle=style.css /usr/share/man/man1/free.1.gz > free.html
Now open the file called free.html
in your favourite browser.
man2html
First, install man2html from the official repositories.
Now, convert a man page:
$ man free | man2html -compress -cgiurl man$section/$title.$section$subsection.html > ~/man/free.html
Another use for man2html
is exporting to raw, printer-friendly text:
$ man free | man2html -bare > ~/free.txt
man -H
The man-db implementation also has the ability to do this on its own:
$ man -H free
This will read your BROWSER
environment variable to determine the browser. You can override this by passing the binary to the -H
option.
roffit
First install roffitAUR.
To convert a man page:
$ gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/free.1.gz | roffit > free.html
Conversion to PDF
man pages have always been printable: they are written in troff(1), which is fundamentally a typesetting language. Therefore, you can easily convert man pages to any of the formats supported as output devices by groff, which is used by man-db. For a list of output devices, see the -T
option in groff(1) (or mandoc(1) if you use the mandoc package).
This will produce a PDF file:
$ man -Tpdf manpage > filename
Caveats: Fonts are generally limited to Times at hardcoded sizes. Some man pages were specifically designed for terminal viewing, and will not look right in PS or PDF form.
Qman
For an alternative interface for reading manual pages, one that supports modern features such as hyperlinks and history, install qman-gitAUR. You can now use qman
in the place of man
:
$ qman ls # Display the manual page for ls $ qman -k ls # Perform apropos on 'ls'
See the project's GitHub page for more information.
Configuration (optional)
Qman's configuration file is located at ~/.config/qman.conf
(user-specific) or /etc/xdg/qman.conf
(system-wide).
If you are using a modern terminal that supports 256 colors and Unicode, you may want to paste this code into your configuration file, to give the software a more modern look.
By default Qman opens hyperlinks and e-mail links using xdg-open
. To override this, add the following to your configuration file:
[misc] browser_path=/path/to/your/browser mailer_path=/path/to/your/email/client
Online man pages
- Arch Linux manual pages—contains man pages from Arch Linux packages. Used for man page links from the wiki. You can also use the
!archman
DuckDuckGo bang to search through the Arch manual pages directly. - man7.org—The Linux man-pages project. Upstream of the man-pages package. The online pages currently show an outdated version of man-pages (5.13, released in 2021).
- manned.org—collection from various Linux distributions, BSD, etc., with multiple package versions.
- linux.die.net
- man.cx—Man pages extracted from Debian testing.
- Debian man pages
- Ubuntu man pages
- DragonFlyBSD man pages
- FreeBSD man pages
- NetBSD man pages
- OpenBSD man pages
- Plan 9 Manual — Volume 1
- Inferno Manual — Volume 1
- The UNIX and Linux forums man page repository
Note that while man-pages provides man pages for POSIX.1-2017 (see [2]), an official online reference also exists:
There is also a comparison table of the online databases.
curl -sL 'https://man.archlinux.org/man/clang.raw' | man -l -
Noteworthy man pages
Here follows a non-exhaustive list of noteworthy pages that might help you understand a lot of things more in-depth. Some of them might serve as a good reference (like the ASCII table).
- ascii(7)
- boot(7)
- charsets(7)
- chmod(1)
- credentials(7)
- fstab(5)
- file-hierarchy(7)
- systemd(1)
- locale(1p), locale(5), locale(7)
- printf(3)
- proc(5)
- regex(7)
- signal(7)
- term(5), term(7)
- termcap(5)
- terminfo(5)
- utf-8(7)
More generally, have a look at category 7 (miscellaneous) pages:
$ man -s 7 -k ".*"
Arch Linux specific pages:
- alpm-hooks(5)
- libalpm(3)
- makepkg(8)
- makepkg.conf(5)
- makepkg-template(1)
- mkinitcpio(8)
- pacman(8)
- pacman.conf(5)
- pacman-conf(8)
- pacman-key(8)