General options¶

-C file, --config-file=file

Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.

-d, --debug

Print debugging information.

-D, --default

This option is normally issued as the very first option and resets man's behaviour to its default. Its use is to reset those options that may have been set in $MANOPT. Any options that follow -D will have their usual effect.

--warnings[=warnings]

Enable warnings from groff. This may be used to perform sanity checks on the source text of manual pages. warnings is a comma-separated list of warning names; if it is not supplied, the default is "mac". See the “Warnings” node in info groff for a list of available warning names.

Main modes of operation¶

-f, --whatis

Equivalent to whatis. Display a short description from the manual page, if available. See whatis(1) for details.

-k, --apropos

Equivalent to apropos. Search the short manual page descriptions for keywords and display any matches. See apropos(1) for details.

-K, --global-apropos

Search for text in all manual pages. This is a brute-force search, and is likely to take some time; if you can, you should specify a section to reduce the number of pages that need to be searched. Search terms may be simple strings (the default), or regular expressions if the --regex option is used.

Note that this searches the sources of the manual pages, not the rendered text, and so may include false positives due to things like comments in source files. Searching the rendered text would be much slower.

-l, --local-file

Activate `local' mode. Format and display local manual files instead of searching through the system's manual collection. Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source file in the correct format. No cat file is produced. If '-' is listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from stdin. When this option is not used, and man fails to find the page required, before displaying the error message, it attempts to act as if this option was supplied, using the name as a filename and looking for an exact match.

-w, --where, --path, --location

Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the location(s) of the source nroff files that would be formatted.

-W, --where-cat, --location-cat

Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the location(s) of the cat files that would be displayed. If -w and -W are both specified, print both separated by a space.

-c, --catman

This option is not for general use and should only be used by the catman program.

-R encoding, --recode=encoding

Instead of formatting the manual page in the usual way, output its source converted to the specified encoding. If you already know the encoding of the source file, you can also use manconv(1) directly. However, this option allows you to convert several manual pages to a single encoding without having to explicitly state the encoding of each, provided that they were already installed in a structure similar to a manual page hierarchy.

Finding manual pages¶

-L locale, --locale=locale

man will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C function setlocale(3) which interrogates various environment variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To temporarily override the determined value, use this option to supply a locale string directly to man. Note that it will not take effect until the search for pages actually begins. Output such as the help message will always be displayed in the initially determined locale.

-m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]

-M path, --manpath=path

Specify an alternate manpath to use. By default, man uses manpath derived code to determine the path to search. This option overrides the $MANPATH environment variable and causes option -m to be ignored.

A path specified as a manpath must be the root of a manual page hierarchy structured into sections as described in the man-db manual (under "The manual page system"). To view manual pages outside such hierarchies, see the -l option.

-S list, -s list, --sections=list

List is a colon- or comma-separated list of `order specific' manual sections to search. This option overrides the $MANSECT environment variable. (The -s spelling is for compatibility with System V.)

-e sub-extension, --extension=sub-extension

Some systems incorporate large packages of manual pages, such as those that accompany the Tcl package, into the main manual page hierarchy. To get around the problem of having two manual pages with the same name such as exit(3), the Tcl pages were usually all assigned to section l. As this is unfortunate, it is now possible to put the pages in the correct section, and to assign a specific `extension' to them, in this case, exit(3tcl). Under normal operation, man will display exit(3) in preference to exit(3tcl). To negotiate this situation and to avoid having to know which section the page you require resides in, it is now possible to give man a sub-extension string indicating which package the page must belong to. Using the above example, supplying the option -e tcl to man will restrict the search to pages having an extension of *tcl.

-i, --ignore-case

Ignore case when searching for manual pages. This is the default.

-I, --match-case

Search for manual pages case-sensitively.

--regex

Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions matching each page argument as a regular expression, as with apropos(1). Since there is usually no reasonable way to pick a "best" page when searching for a regular expression, this option implies -a.

--wildcard

Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions matching each page argument using shell-style wildcards, as with apropos(1) --wildcard. The page argument must match the entire name or description, or match on word boundaries in the description. Since there is usually no reasonable way to pick a "best" page when searching for a wildcard, this option implies -a.

--names-only

If the --regex or --wildcard option is used, match only page names, not page descriptions, as with whatis(1). Otherwise, no effect.

-a, --all

By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds. Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match the search criteria.

-u, --update

This option causes man to perform an `inode level' consistency check on its database caches to ensure that they are an accurate representation of the filesystem. It will only have a useful effect if man is installed with the setuid bit set.

--no-subpages

By default, man will try to interpret pairs of manual page names given on the command line as equivalent to a single manual page name containing a hyphen or an underscore. This supports the common pattern of programs that implement a number of subcommands, allowing them to provide manual pages for each that can be accessed using similar syntax as would be used to invoke the subcommands themselves. For example:

  $ man -aw git diff
  /usr/share/man/man1/git-diff.1.gz
    

To disable this behaviour, use the --no-subpages option.

  $ man -aw --no-subpages git diff
  /usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz
  /usr/share/man/man3/Git.3pm.gz
  /usr/share/man/man1/diff.1.gz
    

Controlling formatted output¶

-P pager, --pager=pager

Specify which output pager to use. By default, man uses pager, falling back to cat if pager is not found or is not executable. This option overrides the $MANPAGER environment variable, which in turn overrides the $PAGER environment variable. It is not used in conjunction with -f or -k.

The value may be a simple command name or a command with arguments, and may use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes). It may not use pipes to connect multiple commands; if you need that, use a wrapper script, which may take the file to display either as an argument or on standard input.

-r prompt, --prompt=prompt

If a recent version of less is used as the pager, man will attempt to set its prompt and some sensible options. The default prompt looks like

 Manual page name(sec) line x

where name denotes the manual page name, sec denotes the section it was found under and x the current line number. This is achieved by using the $LESS environment variable.

Supplying -r with a string will override this default. The string may contain the text $MAN_PN which will be expanded to the name of the current manual page and its section name surrounded by `(' and `)'. The string used to produce the default could be expressed as

\ Manual\ page\ \$MAN_PN\ ?ltline\ %lt?L/%L.:
byte\ %bB?s/%s..?\ (END):?pB\ %pB\\%..
(press h for help or q to quit)

It is broken into three lines here for the sake of readability only. For its meaning see the less(1) manual page. The prompt string is first evaluated by the shell. All double quotes, back-quotes and backslashes in the prompt must be escaped by a preceding backslash. The prompt string may end in an escaped $ which may be followed by further options for less. By default man sets the -ix8 options.

The $MANLESS environment variable described below may be used to set a default prompt string if none is supplied on the command line.

-7, --ascii

When viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7 bit terminal or terminal emulator, some characters may not display correctly when using the latin1(7) device description with GNU nroff. This option allows pure ascii manual pages to be displayed in ascii with the latin1 device. It will not translate any latin1 text. The following table shows the translations performed: some parts of it may only be displayed properly when using GNU nroff's latin1(7) device.

Description	Octal	latin1	ascii
continuation hyphen	255	‐	-
bullet (middle dot)	267	•	o
acute accent	264	´	'
multiplication sign	327	×	x

If the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal may be set up for latin1 characters and this option is not necessary. If the latin1 and ascii columns are identical, you are reading this page using this option or man did not format this page using the latin1 device description. If the latin1 column is missing or corrupt, you may need to view manual pages with this option.

This option is ignored when using options -t, -H, -T, or -Z and may be useless for nroff other than GNU's.

-E encoding, --encoding=encoding

Generate output for a character encoding other than the default. For backward compatibility, encoding may be an nroff device such as ascii, latin1, or utf8 as well as a true character encoding such as UTF-8.

--no-hyphenation, --nh

Normally, nroff will automatically hyphenate text at line breaks even in words that do not contain hyphens, if it is necessary to do so to lay out words on a line without excessive spacing. This option disables automatic hyphenation, so words will only be hyphenated if they already contain hyphens.

If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent nroff from hyphenating a word at an inappropriate point, do not use this option, but consult the nroff documentation instead; for instance, you can put "\%" inside a word to indicate that it may be hyphenated at that point, or put "\%" at the start of a word to prevent it from being hyphenated.

--no-justification, --nj

Normally, nroff will automatically justify text to both margins. This option disables full justification, leaving justified only to the left margin, sometimes called "ragged-right" text.

If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent nroff from justifying certain paragraphs, do not use this option, but consult the nroff documentation instead; for instance, you can use the ".na", ".nf", ".fi", and ".ad" requests to temporarily disable adjusting and filling.

-p string, --preprocessor=string

Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or troff/groff. Not all installations will have a full set of preprocessors. 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. zsoelim is always run as the very first preprocessor.

-t, --troff

Use groff -mandoc to format the manual page to stdout. This option is not required in conjunction with -H, -T, or -Z.

-T[device], --troff-device[=device]

This option is used to change groff (or possibly troff's) output to be suitable for a device other than the default. It implies -t. Examples (provided with Groff-1.17) include dvi, latin1, ps, utf8, X75 and X100.

-H[browser], --html[=browser]

This option will cause groff to produce HTML output, and will display that output in a web browser. The choice of browser is determined by the optional browser argument if one is provided, by the $BROWSER environment variable, or by a compile-time default if that is unset (usually lynx). This option implies -t, and will only work with GNU troff.

-X[dpi], --gxditview[=dpi]

This option displays the output of groff in a graphical window using the gxditview program. The dpi (dots per inch) may be 75, 75-12, 100, or 100-12, defaulting to 75; the -12 variants use a 12-point base font. This option implies -T with the X75, X75-12, X100, or X100-12 device respectively.

-Z, --ditroff

groff will run troff and then use an appropriate post-processor to produce output suitable for the chosen device. If groff -mandoc is groff, this option is passed to groff and will suppress the use of a post-processor. It implies -t.

Getting help¶

-?, --help

Print a help message and exit.

--usage

Print a short usage message and exit.

-V, --version

Display version information.