man

Question 1

man

Answer 1

man is the system’s manual pager.

Question 2

Section Numbers Of The Manual

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Answer 2

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)

8 System administration commands (usually only for root)

9 Kernel routines [Non standard]

Question 3

man

• f
• k
• K

Answer 3

• f, –whatis, Equivalent to whatis. Dispay a short description from man page if available.
• k, –apropos, Equivalent to apropos. Search the short manual page descriptions for keywords and display matches.
• K, –global-apropos, Search for text in all manual pages. This is a brute-force search and will take time.

Question 4

man

• w
• W

Answer 4

• w, –where, –path, –location, Don’t display the manual pages, but print the locations of the source nroff files that would be formatted.
• W, –where-cat, –location-cat, Don’t display the manual pages, but print the locations of the cat files that would be displayed.

Question 5

man

• S
• i
• I
• a

Answer 5

• S list, -s list, –sections=list, List is a colon or comma-separated list of ‘order specific’ manual sections to search.
• i, –ignore-case, Ignore case when searching for manual pages. This is the default.
• I, –match-case, Search for manual pages case-sensitively.
• a, –all, By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitale manual page it finds. With this option it forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match the search.

Question 6

man ls

Displays the manual page for ls.

man man.7

Displays the manual page for macro page man from section 7.

man -a intro

Displays in succession, all of the available intro man pages.

Answer 6

man -k printf

Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf and print any matches.

man -f smail

Lookup the manual pages references by smail and print out the short descriptions of any found.