NAME¶
man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
SYNOPSIS¶
man [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
[
--warnings[=
warnings]] [
-R encoding] [
-L
locale] [
-m system[,...]] [
-M path]
[
-S list] [
-e extension] [
-i|
-I]
[
--regex|
--wildcard] [
--names-only] [
-a]
[
-u] [
--no-subpages] [
-P pager] [
-r
prompt] [
-7] [
-E encoding]
[
--no-hyphenation] [
--no-justification] [
-p
string] [
-t] [
-T[
device]]
[
-H[
browser]] [
-X[
dpi]] [
-Z]
[[
section]
page ...] ...
man -k [
apropos options]
regexp ...
man -K [
-w|
-W] [
-S list]
[
-i|
-I] [
--regex] [
section]
term ...
man -f [
whatis options]
page ...
man -l [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
[
--warnings[=
warnings]] [
-R encoding] [
-L
locale] [
-P pager] [
-r prompt] [
-7]
[
-E encoding] [
-p string] [
-t]
[
-T[
device]] [
-H[
browser]] [
-X[
dpi]]
[
-Z]
file ...
man -w|
-W [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
page ...
man -c [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
page
...
man [
-hV]
DESCRIPTION¶
man is the system's manual pager. Each
page argument given to
man is normally the name of a program, utility or function. The
manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and
displayed. A
section, if provided, will direct
man to look only
in that
section of the manual. The default action is to search in all
of the available
sections, following a pre-defined order and to show
only the first
page found, even if
page exists in several
sections.
The table below shows the
section numbers of the manual followed by the
types of pages they contain.
1 |
Executable programs or shell commands |
2 |
System calls (functions provided by the kernel) |
3 |
Library calls (functions within program libraries) |
4 |
Special files (usually found in /dev) |
5 |
File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd |
6 |
Games |
7 |
Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g.
man(7), groff(7) |
8 |
System administration commands (usually only for root) |
9 |
Kernel routines [Non standard] |
A manual
page consists of several sections.
Conventional section names include
NAME,
SYNOPSIS,
CONFIGURATION,
DESCRIPTION,
OPTIONS,
EXIT STATUS,
RETURN VALUE,
ERRORS,
ENVIRONMENT,
FILES,
VERSIONS,
CONFORMING TO,
NOTES,
BUGS,
EXAMPLE,
AUTHORS, and
SEE ALSO.
The following conventions apply to the
SYNOPSIS section and can be used
as a guide in other sections.
bold text |
type exactly as shown. |
italic text |
replace with appropriate argument. |
[-abc] |
any or all arguments within [ ] are optional. |
-a|-b |
options delimited by | cannot be used together. |
argument ... |
argument is repeatable. |
[expression] ... |
entire expression within [ ] is repeatable. |
Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device. For instance, man will
usually not be able to render italics when running in a terminal, and will
typically use underlined or coloured text instead.
The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all possible
invocations. In some cases it is advisable to illustrate several exclusive
invocations as is shown in the
SYNOPSIS section of this manual page.
EXAMPLES¶
- man ls
- Display the manual page for the item (program)
ls.
- man -a intro
- Display, in succession, all of the available intro
manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between
successive displays or skip any of them.
- man -t alias | lpr -Pps
- Format the manual page referenced by `alias',
usually a shell manual page, into the default troff or groff
format and pipe it to the printer named ps. The default output for
groff is usually PostScript. man --help should advise as to
which processor is bound to the -t option.
- man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi
- This command will decompress and format the nroff source
manual page ./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi)
file. The redirection is necessary as the -T flag causes output to
be directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed
with a program such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript
using a program such as dvips.
- man -k printf
- Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the
keyword printf as regular expression. Print out any matches.
Equivalent to apropos -r printf.
- man -f smail
- Lookup the manual pages referenced by smail and
print out the short descriptions of any found. Equivalent to
whatis -r smail.
OVERVIEW¶
Many options are available to
man in order to give as much flexibility as
possible to the user. Changes can be made to the search path, section order,
output processor, and other behaviours and operations detailed below.
If set, various environment variables are interrogated to determine the
operation of
man. It is possible to set the `catch all' variable
$
MANOPT to any string in command line format with the exception that
any spaces used as part of an option's argument must be escaped (preceded by a
backslash).
man will parse $
MANOPT prior to parsing its own
command line. Those options requiring an argument will be overridden by the
same options found on the command line. To reset all of the options set in
$
MANOPT,
-D can be specified as the initial command line option.
This will allow man to `forget' about the options specified in $
MANOPT
although they must still have been valid.
The manual pager utilities packaged as
man-db make extensive use of
index database caches. These caches contain information such as where
each manual page can be found on the filesystem and what its
whatis
(short one line description of the man page) contains, and allow
man to
run faster than if it had to search the filesystem each time to find the
appropriate manual page. If requested using the
-u option,
man
will ensure that the caches remain consistent, which can obviate the need to
manually run software to update traditional
whatis text databases.
If
man cannot find a
mandb initiated
index database for a
particular manual page hierarchy, it will still search for the requested
manual pages, although file globbing will be necessary to search within that
hierarchy. If
whatis or
apropos fails to find an
index it
will try to extract information from a traditional
whatis database
instead.
These utilities support compressed source nroff files having, by default, the
extensions of
.Z,
.z and
.gz. It is possible to deal with
any compression extension, but this information must be known at compile time.
Also, by default, any cat pages produced are compressed using
gzip.
Each `global' manual page hierarchy such as
/usr/share/man or
/usr/X11R6/man may have any directory as its cat page hierarchy.
Traditionally the cat pages are stored under the same hierarchy as the man
pages, but for reasons such as those specified in the
File Hierarchy
Standard (FHS), it may be better to store them elsewhere. For details on
how to do this, please read
manpath(5). For details on why to do this,
read the standard.
International support is available with this package. Native language manual
pages are accessible (if available on your system) via use of
locale
functions. To activate such support, it is necessary to set either
$
LC_MESSAGES, $
LANG or another system dependent environment
variable to your language locale, usually specified in the
POSIX 1003.1
based format:
<
language>[
_<
territory>[
.<
character-set>[
,<
version>]]]
If the desired page is available in your
locale, it will be displayed in
lieu of the standard (usually American English) page.
Support for international message catalogues is also featured in this package
and can be activated in the same way, again if available. If you find that the
manual pages and message catalogues supplied with this package are not
available in your native language and you would like to supply them, please
contact the maintainer who will be coordinating such activity.
For information regarding other features and extensions available with this
manual pager, please read the documents supplied with the package.
DEFAULTS¶
man will search for the desired manual pages within the
index
database caches. If the
-u option is given, a cache consistency check
is performed to ensure the databases accurately reflect the filesystem. If
this option is always given, it is not generally necessary to run
mandb
after the caches are initially created, unless a cache becomes corrupt.
However, the cache consistency check can be slow on systems with many manual
pages installed, so it is not performed by default, and system administrators
may wish to run
mandb every week or so to keep the database caches
fresh. To forestall problems caused by outdated caches,
man will fall
back to file globbing if a cache lookup fails, just as it would if no cache
was present.
Once a manual page has been located, a check is performed to find out if a
relative preformatted `cat' file already exists and is newer than the nroff
file. If it does and is, this preformatted file is (usually) decompressed and
then displayed, via use of a pager. The pager can be specified in a number of
ways, or else will fall back to a default is used (see option
-P for
details). If no cat is found or is older than the nroff file, the nroff is
filtered through various programs and is shown immediately.
If a cat file can be produced (a relative cat directory exists and has
appropriate permissions),
man will compress and store the cat file in
the background.
The filters are deciphered by a number of means. Firstly, the command line
option
-p or the environment variable $
MANROFFSEQ is
interrogated. If
-p was not used and the environment variable was not
set, the initial line of the nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string.
To contain a valid preprocessor string, the first line must resemble
'\" <
string>
where
string can be any combination of letters described by option
-p below.
If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default set is
used.
A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary formatter
(
nroff or [
tg]
roff with
-t) and executed.
Alternatively, if an executable program
mandb_nfmt (or
mandb_tfmt with
-t) exists in the man tree root, it is executed
instead. It gets passed the manual source file, the preprocessor string, and
optionally the device specified with
-T or
-E as arguments.
OPTIONS¶
Non argument options that are duplicated either on the command line, in
$
MANOPT, or both, are not harmful. For options that require an
argument, each duplication will override the previous argument value.
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.
- -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, --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[,...]
If this system has access to other operating
system's manual pages, they can be accessed using this option. To search for a
manual page from NewOS's manual page collection, use the option
-m
NewOS.
The
system specified can be a combination of comma delimited operating
system names. To include a search of the native operating system's manual
pages, include the system name
man in the argument string. This option
will override the $
SYSTEM environment variable.
- -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
- -P pager, --pager=pager
- Specify which output pager to use. By default, man
uses pager -s. 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.
If you want to override man's prompt string processing completely,
use the $MANLESS environment variable described below.
- -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¶
- -h, --help
- Print a help message and exit.
- -V, --version
- Display version information.
EXIT STATUS¶
- 0
- Successful program execution.
- 1
- Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
- 2
- Operational error.
- 3
- A child process returned a non-zero exit status.
- 16
- At least one of the pages/files/keywords didn't exist or
wasn't matched.
ENVIRONMENT¶
- MANPATH
- If $MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to
search for manual pages.
- MANROFFOPT
- The contents of $MANROFFOPT are added to the command
line every time man invokes the formatter (nroff,
troff, or groff).
- MANROFFSEQ
- If $MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to
determine the set of preprocessors to pass each manual page through. The
default preprocessor list is system dependent.
- MANSECT
- If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited
list of sections and it is used to determine which manual sections to
search and in what order.
- MANPAGER, PAGER
- If $MANPAGER or $PAGER is set
($MANPAGER is used in preference), its value is used as the name of
the program used to display the manual page. By default, pager -s
is used.
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.
- MANLESS
- If $MANLESS is set, man will not perform any
of its usual processing to set up a prompt string for the less
pager. Instead, the value of $MANLESS will be copied verbatim into
$LESS. For example, if you want to set the prompt string
unconditionally to “my prompt string”, set $MANLESS to
‘-Psmy prompt string’.
- BROWSER
- If $BROWSER is set, its value is a colon-delimited
list of commands, each of which in turn is used to try to start a web
browser for man --html. In each command, %s is
replaced by a filename containing the HTML output from groff,
%% is replaced by a single percent sign (%), and %c is
replaced by a colon (:).
- SYSTEM
- If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as
if it had been specified as the argument to the -m option.
- MANOPT
- If $MANOPT is set, it will be parsed prior to
man's command line and is expected to be in a similar format. As
all of the other man specific environment variables can be
expressed as command line options, and are thus candidates for being
included in $MANOPT it is expected that they will become obsolete.
N.B. All spaces that should be interpreted as part of an option's argument
must be escaped.
- MANWIDTH
- If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the line
length for which manual pages should be formatted. If it is not set,
manual pages will be formatted with a line length appropriate to the
current terminal (using an ioctl(2) if available, the value of
$COLUMNS, or falling back to 80 characters if neither is
available). Cat pages will only be saved when the default formatting can
be used, that is when the terminal line length is between 66 and 80
characters.
- MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING
- Normally, when output is not being directed to a terminal
(such as to a file or a pipe), formatting characters are discarded to make
it easier to read the result without special tools. However, if
$MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING is set to any non-empty value, these
formatting characters are retained. This may be useful for wrappers around
man that can interpret formatting characters.
- MAN_KEEP_STDERR
- Normally, when output is being directed to a terminal
(usually to a pager), any error output from the command used to produce
formatted versions of manual pages is discarded to avoid interfering with
the pager's display. Programs such as groff often produce
relatively minor error messages about typographical problems such as poor
alignment, which are unsightly and generally confusing when displayed
along with the manual page. However, some users want to see them anyway,
so, if $MAN_KEEP_STDERR is set to any non-empty value, error output
will be displayed as usual.
- LANG, LC_MESSAGES
- Depending on system and implementation, either or both of
$LANG and $LC_MESSAGES will be interrogated for the current
message locale. man will display its messages in that locale (if
available). See setlocale(3) for precise details.
FILES¶
- /etc/manpath.config
- man-db configuration file.
- /usr/share/man
- A global manual page hierarchy.
- /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
- A traditional global index database cache.
- /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
- An FHS compliant global index database cache.
SEE ALSO¶
apropos(1),
groff(1),
less(1),
manpath(1),
nroff(1),
troff(1),
whatis(1),
zsoelim(1),
setlocale(3),
manpath(5),
ascii(7),
latin1(7),
man(7),
catman(8),
mandb(8), the man-db package manual,
FSSTND
HISTORY¶
1990, 1991 - Originally written by John W. Eaton (jwe@che.utexas.edu).
Dec 23 1992: Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) applied bug fixes supplied by Willem
Kasdorp (wkasdo@nikhefk.nikef.nl).
30th April 1994 - 23rd February 2000: Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk) has been
developing and maintaining this package with the help of a few dedicated
people.
30th October 1996 - 30th March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco
<fpolacco@debian.org> maintained and enhanced this package for the
Debian project, with the help of all the community.
31st March 2001 - present day: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> is now
developing and maintaining man-db.