Open System Services Shell and Utilities Reference Manual (G06.27+, H06.04+)

man(1) OSS Shell and Utilities Reference Manual
DESCRIPTION
The man program provides online access to the system’s reference pages.
Reference pages must be located within a known directory structure. A directory structure is
known when it is specified by the -M option, by a value in the MANPATH environment variable,
or by default.
Subdirectories within each known directory structure are searched in a speci
fic order for a
requested reference page. Only the first matching reference page is returned by the command.
The man command searches subdirectories in the following order:
• Subdirectories named mann are searched first for nroff source files to format. The man
command attempts to call the /bin/nroff formatter to process the first file it finds whose
file name matches the title specified in the command line. Note that the /bin/nroff for-
matter is not provided with the OSS shell.
The value used for n is the value specified for section in the command. If no value is
specified for section, then the man command searches the subdirectories using values for
n in the following order:
C, L, F, n, l, p, o, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
The man command formats and displays the first reference page source file it finds
whose name matches the title specified in the command line.
• When no matching file exists in the subdirectories named mann, the man command
searches the subdirectories named catn.
The value used for n is the value specified for section in the command. If no value is
specified for section, then the man command searches the subdirectories using values for
n in the following order:
C, L, F, n, l, p, o, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
The man command displays the first formatted reference page it finds whose file name
matches the title specified in the command line.
The basic OSS product includes formatted reference pages in the following subdirectories:
cat1 Commands available to the general interactive user.
cat2 Application program interface functions reserved on some UNIX systems to use
by privileged programs (this restriction does not exist on OSS systems).
cat3 Application program interface functions available to all C and C++ language
programs.
cat4 Application program interface header files and other file formats.
cat5 Miscellaneous topics.
cat7 Special file information.
cat8 Commands intended for system administrators.
The cat6 directory is empty (it is traditionally reserved for game information).
These subdirectories exist in the following directory structures:
/usr/share/man
Contains the basic OSS product set reference pages.
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