Manual

About
Most UBOs have manual pages.

MAN(1)                    OpenBSD Reference Manual                     MAN(1) NAME man - display the on-line manual pages SYNOPSIS man [-achw] [-C file] [-M path] [-m path] [-S subsection] [-s section] [section] name [...] man -f command man -k keyword DESCRIPTION

The types of manpages have sections which they are grouped in. Here is the manual page layout of BSD:


 * Section 1 : General commands (tools and utilities)
 * Section 2 : System calls and error numbers
 * Section 3 : Library functions, especially for C and Tk
 * Section 4 : Special files and hardware support
 * Section 5 : File formats, especially configuration files
 * Section 6 : Games
 * Section 7 : Miscellaneous information pages
 * Section 8 : System maintenance and operation commands
 * Section 9 : Kernel internals

When someone tells you to run "man 6 tetris", that means that you should read the tetris manpage found in section 6 of the manpages. Sometimes the same manpage name exists, but in different sections. One example is the fstat manpage it exists in sections 1 and 2. The lower number sections take precedence over higher numbered sections. Thus, to see the manpage for fstat in section 2 you would type: $ man 2 fstat

Similarely functions, syscalls or commands are sometimes mentioned with the section of manpages in brackets behind them like so: fstat(2), you'll see this mentioned a lot in this wiki.

Simple example to type at your shell prompt of most UBOs: $ man 1 intro This brings up the man page for intro(1). You can use your spacebar to go down a page, and "q" for quit.

Installing manpages
On Debian based GNU/Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install manpages

Creating windex
If you're looking for a man page and get the following: /usr/share/man/windex: No such file or directory
 * 1) man -k snoop

It means you have yet to create your Index: #
 * 1) /usr/bin/catman -w

Searching for Manual Pages
It is possible to do a keyword search in the manpage system.

$ man -k filesystem OpenBSD::Vstat (3p) - virtual filesystem for pkg_add(1) simulations dump (8) - filesystem backup fstab (5) - static information about the filesystems ...

Another command synonymous to man -k is apropos:

$ apropos archiver tar (1) - tape archiver

Do notice that the section of the manpage is displayed in the keyword search, this is to ease viewing the particular manpage.

is used, unless something else is explicitly specified.

Location of Manual Pages
In BSD the default manual pages are located in /usr/share/man. This can be changed with the MANPATH environment variable:

$ export MANPATH=/usr/local/man $ man ls man: no entry for ls in the manual. $ unset MANPATH $ man ls LS(1)                     OpenBSD Reference Manual                      LS(1) ...

Another manpage section can be added on to the current MANPATH:

$ export MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/usr/local/man

Searching in a man page
Often you will want to search a man page you are viewing for a particular keyword. You can preceed this search word with a "/". If I wanted to see what mediaopt(ions) my sis NIC has I could do

/mediaopt

while reading the sis(4) manpage I have on my system. If the first result is not what I want, I don't have to type the full search word after the first time, I can simply use /

which is to "find another instance". This btw can also be achieved by typing "n" (lowercase) to search forward and "N" (uppercase) to search backwards, at least on FreeBSD.