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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 arch[:machine]] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager]
	 [-S list] [section] name ...

DESCRIPTION
     The  man  utility formats and displays the on-line manual pages.  This ver-
     sion 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 display 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 sections 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 variable.

     -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        Do  not	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 arch[:machine]
	       As some manual pages are intended only for specific architectures
	       and machine types, man searches any subdirectories, with the same
	       name as the current machine type and architecture, in  every  di-
	       rectory	which  it  searches.  Machine specific areas are checked
	       before architecture specific areas, and architecture specific ar-
	       eas  are  checked  before  general  areas.   For   example,   for
	       "i386:pc98",  the  following  subdirectories will be searched for
	       section 8 manpages, in order: man8/pc98, man8/i386, and man8.

	       The current machine type may be overridden using this  option  or
	       by setting the environment variable MACHINE to the name of a spe-
	       cific  machine.	The current architecture may be overridden using
	       this option or by setting the environment  variable  MACHINE_ARCH
	       to  the	name  of a specific architecture.  This option overrides
	       the MACHINE and MACHINE_ARCH environment  variables.   A  machine
	       component, if omitted, defaults to arch.

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

	       By  default, man searches for a localized manpage in a set of lo-
	       cale 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 the "de_DE.ISO8859-1" locale, man will search in
	       the following subdirectories of the /usr/share/man manpath compo-
	       nent:

		     /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(1) or
	       troff(1).  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 environment
	       variable.

     -t        Use  "/usr/bin/groff  -S -man" to format the manual page, passing
	       the output to stdout.  The default output format of  groff(1)  is
	       Postscript,  but see the manual page of groff(1) for ways to pick
	       an alternate format.

	       Depending on the selected format and the availability of printing
	       devices, the output may need to be passed through some filter  or
	       another before being printed.

     -w        Do  not	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.

     MACHINE_ARCH  If MACHINE_ARCH is set, its value is  used  to  override  the
		   current  architecture  when	searching  architecture 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(1) or troff(1).  By
		   default, pages are  passed  through	the  table  preprocessor
		   (tbl(1)) before nroff(1).

     MANSECT	   If  MANSECT is set, its value is used to determine which man-
		   ual 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 8.2			December 3, 2005			  MAN(1)
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