Unix Manual Pages by [Theo Verelst] man [-k] [-s {on some systems}] [section] page The man command on [Linux], [Unix], and under [cygwin] on all [windows] versions except the small portable ones, allows you to view manual pages for (in principle) all commands on the system. If we'd want to know what the command 'ps' (process status) works like, we'd type man ps and get: PS(1) CYGWIN PS(1) SYNOPSIS ps [-aefls] [-u UID] OPTIONS -a, --all show processes of all users -e, --everyone show processes of all users -f, --full show process uids, ppids -h, --help output usage information and exit -l, --long show process uids, ppids, pgids, winpids -s, --summary show process summary ....(etc) if we don't know the options and usage of a certain man version, we type on the target machine: man man to get the manual page of man itself: man(1) man(1) NAME man - format and display the on-line manual pages manpath - determine user's search path for man pages SYNOPSIS man [-acdfFhkKtwW] [--path] [-m system] [-p string] [-C config_file] [-M pathlist] [-P pager] [-S section_list] [section] name ... DESCRIPTION man formats and displays the on-line manual pages. If you specify sec- tion, man only looks in that section of the manual. name is normally the name of the manual page, which is typically the name of a command, function, or file. However, if name contains a slash (/) then man interprets it as a file specification, so that you can do man ./foo.5 or even man /cd/foo/bar.1.gz. See below for a description of where man looks for the manual page files. OPTIONS -C config_file Specify the configuration file to use; the default is ... (etc) A good manual page probably has: Section indication NAME of the command with description SYNOPSIS in generic format the possibly optional and symbolic or literal arguments and their order DESCRIPTION in human readable form, concise and short what the command does OPTIONS available, their exact form in a list, and short and concise description of each and the conbinations SEE ALSO cross reference to related commands and possibly: BUGS obvioiusly: known bugs or limitations ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES the command uses or affects. One can use man -k to search for keyword in all manual page headers and get a list of results per line. In such useage lines, it used to be standard to take <> as indicating literals, and [] as optional arguments, and ... as possible repetition. To make this work, the whatis command must be initialized by updating the man database, probably with something like calling the script: /usr/sbin/makewhatis Under linux I guess that could be /sbin/makewhatis , probably only accessable by root. Under [cygwin] on windows, where this all works, the tcl/tk manual pages are not automatically available if you installed you own TCL/TK. Cygwin currently has I think wish8.3 or so installed, and has possible manual pages for them, but that would not necessarily be for your version, which can be delusive. Also, under windows XX, tcl/tk comes not with man formatted manual, only window help file compiled format (or something, which unfortunately cannot have its font size set seperately (annoying when running a 1600x1200 workstation like setup wanting some things smal as possible, and a manual page at a neatly readable non-eye-straining size). One could get the Linux files for the same version, and install those under /cygdrive/c/cygwin/usr/man/mann or something. Man is conceptually a concatenation of two programs, driven by a database, first a formatter, usually nroff (see manual page on unix/linux), and then a pager, usually a 'more' (or 'less') variation, which show its input text one terminal page at a time, paced by for a new screen, to scroll one line, and for one page back (when available, not possible on stream inputs): nroff -man /somepath/somemanualpage.n | more ---- What does all this mean for Windows inhabitants? It's common among [Tcl'ers] to say, "it's in the man page" to mean "what you search appears in the standard documentation which appears in a Tcl distribution". Under Unix, as described above, a canonical installation makes this standard documentation visible through `man COMMAND`. It's also present under Windows, but there the easiest access is through [[describe how to navigate to Tcl Help]]. ---- [Category Command]