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The man command is the main source of online documentation on Unix systems. It is simple to invoke from the Unix command line:
login% man name_of_command
where name_of_command is the the command about which you'd like some information. So man date would give you information about the date command.
You can also search for all man pages whose summaries mention a keyword:
login% man -k keyword
All versions of the man program at OGI CSEE support the MANPATH environment variable, which is a list of directories to search for manual pages. By default, the MANPATH variable is set in the .cshrc provided to new users. Here is an example MANPATH:
/usr/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/local/X11/man
It is possible to set up your own manual page tree for software you have developed or installed. For information on the format of a manual page, see man 5 man for a description of the troff macros provided for this task.
Once you have your manual pages, you need to organize them into
the proper directory structure. One good place to have manual pages is
in a directory called man in your home directory. Within the
man directory, you need to create subdirectories called
man1 and cat1. Place the manual pages
you have created in man/man1 with a file suffix of .1
(ex: mypage.1).
Finally, you can run the program /usr/bin/makewhatis with the
directory ~/man as arguments. This will create the file
~/man/whatis, which is used by man -k in indexing.
Make sure you add ~/man to your MANPATH environment variable.
OHSU :: OGI :: CSEE :: Support :: CSEE :: Unix
This page was most recently revised on February 03, 2006.
Please address questions or comments to the webmaster.