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MAN(1)			     General Commands Manual			  MAN(1)

NAME
     man -- format and display the on-line manual pages

SYNOPSIS
     man [-adfhkotw] [-m machine] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager] [-S list]
	 [section] name ...

DESCRIPTION
     Man  formats  and	displays  the  on-line manual pages.  This version knows
     about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can have your own
     set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you like	to  dis-
     play  the formatted pages.  If section is specified, man only looks in that
     section of the manual.  You may also specify the order to search  the  sec-
     tions  for  entries  and which preprocessors to run on the source files via
     command line options or environment variables.  If enabled  by  the  system
     administrator,  formatted	man  pages  will  also	be  compressed	with the
     `/usr/bin/gzip -c' command to save space.

     The options are as follows:

     -M path	 Specify an alternate manpath.	By default, man uses  manpath(1)
		 (which  is  built into the man binary) to determine the path to
		 search.  This option overrides the  MANPATH  environment  vari-
		 able.

     -P pager	 Specify  which  pager	to  use.   By default, man uses more -s.
		 This option overrides the PAGER environment variable.

     -S list	 List is a colon separated list of manual  sections  to  search.
		 This option overrides the MANSECT environment variable.

     -a 	 By  default,  man  will  exit after displaying the first manual
		 page it finds.  Using this option forces man to display all the
		 manual pages that match name, not just the first.

     -d 	 Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of  de-
		 bugging information.

     -f 	 Equivalent to whatis.

     -h 	 Print a help message and exit.

     -k 	 Equivalent to apropos.

     -m machine  As  some  manual pages are intended only for specific architec-
		 tures, man searches any subdirectories, with the same	name  as
		 the current architecture, in every directory which it searches.
		 Machine  specific  areas are checked before general areas.  The
		 current machine type may be overridden using this option or  by
		 setting  the environment variable MACHINE to the name of a spe-
		 cific architecture.  This option overrides the MACHINE environ-
		 ment variable.

     -o 	 Look for original, non-localized manpages only.

		 By default, man searches for a localized manpage in  a  set  of
		 locale subdirectories of each manpath(1) component.

		 Locale  name is taken from the first of three environment vari-
		 ables with a nonempty value: LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, or LANG, in  the
		 specified order.

		 If  the value could not be determined, or is not a valid locale
		 name, then only non-localized manpage will be looked up.

		 Otherwise, man will search in the following subdirectories,  in
		 the order of precedence:

		       <lang>_<country>.<charset>
		       <lang>.<charset>
		       en.<charset>

		 For  example,	for "de_DE.ISO8859-1" locale, man will search in
		 the following subdirectories of the /usr/share/man manpath com-
		 ponent:

		       /usr/share/man/de_DE.ISO8859-1
		       /usr/share/man/de.ISO8859-1
		       /usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1

		 Finally, if the search of localized manpage fails, it	will  be
		 looked up in the default /usr/share/man directory.

     -p string	 Specify  the  sequence  of preprocessors to run before nroff or
		 troff.  Not all installations will have  a  full  set	of  pre-
		 processors.   Some of the preprocessors and the letters used to
		 designate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic (p), tbl (t), vgrind
		 (v), refer (r).  This option overrides the MANROFFSEQ	environ-
		 ment variable.

     -t 	 Use  /usr/bin/groff  -S -man to format the manual page, passing
		 the output to stdout.	The output from /usr/bin/groff	-S  -man
		 may need to be passed through some filter or another before be-
		 ing printed.

     -w 	 Don't	actually  display  the man pages, but do print the loca-
		 tion(s) of the files that would be formatted or displayed.

ENVIRONMENT
     LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG
		 These variables  specify  the	preferred  language  for  manual
		 pages.  (See the -o option above.)

     MACHINE	 If  MACHINE  is  set, its value is used to override the current
		 machine type when searching machine specific subdirectories.

     MANPATH	 If MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search  for
		 manual pages.

     MANROFFSEQ  If MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of
		 preprocessors	run  before running nroff or troff.  By default,
		 pages are passed through the table preprocessor before nroff.

     MANSECT	 If MANSECT is set, its value is used to determine which  manual
		 sections to search.

     PAGER	 If  PAGER  is set, its value is used as the name of the program
		 to use to display the man page.  By default, more -s is used.

EXAMPLES
     Normally, to look at the relevant manpage information for getopt, one would
     use:

	   man getopt

     However, when referring to a  specific  section  of  the  manual,	such  as
     getopt(3), one would use:

	   man 3 getopt

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1), groff(1), manpath(1), more(1), whatis(1), man(7), mdoc(7)

BUGS
     The -t option only works if the troff(1)-like program is installed.

FreeBSD 5.5			 January 5, 1991			  MAN(1)
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