MPE/iX Shell and Utilities Reference Manual, Vol 1

man(1) MPE/iX Shell and Utilities man(1)
To find a given entry, man follows these search rules. If you specified a section, man searches
for the appropriate entry in that section of the manual; otherwise man looks for the first entry
named entry regardless of the section. If any rule results in finding the man page, man dis-
plays the entry and exits.
• man checks each directory in
MANPATH for a file named man.dbz. If it exists, man
looks for the requested entry in its index (see File Format).
• For each possible section (that is, section if you specified it, or all sections in order from 1
through 9, then 0 if you did not):
• man checks each directory in
MANPATH for a file named catn/entry.n, where n is
the section number. If it exists, man checks to see if it was compressed with pack or
compress, and uncompresses it (calling pcat if the file was packed.)
• man checks each directory in MANPATH
for a file named mann/entry.n. This is the
unformatted manual entry. It is assumed to be in troff format.
If output is to the terminal, then man invokes a pager command to filter and display the man-
ual pages. If
MANPAGER is defined, it is used. If not, then if PAGER is defined, it is used;
otherwise, man defaults to using the command:
more –A –s
File Format
The manual files are normally kept in a single large file, called man.dbz. The file starts with
a magic text string:
!<man database compressed>\n
and continues with the index:
14 bytes formatted man page name
9 bytes seek pointer
9 bytes length
The name is simply the entry name, followed by dot and the section number, for example, this
man page would be named man.1. When man finds a matching entry, it then seeks to the
point in the file specified by the given seek pointer, and uncompresses for length bytes. Each
manual entry is compressed separately.
EXAMPLES
In order to find out which utilities do comparisons, it might be useful to type:
man -k compare
Commands and Utilities 1-363