How do I view the man pages?
I'm new to Linux. I got the "Unix And Linux System Administration Handbook" It speaks of several verisons of linux and unix, and the commands for viewing linux man pages and not specific to ubuntu.
How do I view the manpages?
26 Answers
To view a manual page related to a package, open a terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T together) and type:
man <package_name>For example, to view grep's manual page, type:
man grepThis will open the manual page referring to the section numbers in the order:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 If you want to open the manual page of a specific section, type:
man <section_number> <package_name>For example, to open the manual page of the open() function in C, you should type:
man 2 openMore information:
Refer to the the manual page for
man.Search through Ubuntu Manpages at: .
@Jobin answer is perfect, I always like to add more options so Op can know it.
If you want to redirect a command man to a txt file:
man <command> > /location/file (change location and the name of file )Another thing I would like you to know:
When for example you type man ls, you will see LS (1) at the top, numbers mean:
(1) User Commands (2) System Calls (3) Library functions (4) Devices (5) File formats (6) Games and Amusements (7) Conventions and Miscellany (8) System Administration and Priveledged Commands (L) Local. Some programs install their man pages into this section instead (N) TCL commandsAnd if you want to view man pages on terminal I would prefer to use:
man <command> | less so you can view it as pages
For more options: man man
If using unity you can also access thru the Dash via yelp & the manpages scope
Open Dash home, type in manpages:whatever, ex. manpages:bash
Available man's will be displayed, when clicked on open in help window
The bookmark option in help when opened this way is semi useful, could be better.
You can also view man pages in a browser.
Install the man2html package using sudo apt-get install man2html and then navigate to
You can use man package/command(name) and for more information about how man works try using man man
Your knee-jerk reaction when trying to study about new command or config file should be:
man command
man file.confor
man command<Tab>
man file<Tab>The argument to man is actually manpage name and the package maintainer is expected to add any manpages users would need. For many prolific packages, you can normally expect:
one manpage per command -- named exactly as the command,
at least one manpage about configuration files (typically named exactly as the main configuration file).
However the man page system is a huge, really rich resource. There are actually far more man pages that don't deal with particular command or even particular program. For example, the manpage system typically contains documentation of:
commands (section 1) but often also pages that are not directly commands eg. perlre,
kernel calls (section 2),
system library calls (section 3),
special system files (section 4),
configuration files and formats (section 5),
games (yes, games! .. although I've never seen anything there) (section 6),
miscellaneous stuff (like
man 7 ascii,man 7 iso-8859-1,man 7 wireless) (section 7)
Also, packages may provide their documentation as manpage sections. For example, perl-doc adds section 3perl where you can find all its modules, OpenSSL adds 3ssl.
Not sure if it's on Ububtu, but on Fedora there is man-pages package that provides even more goods like POSIX versions of commands or system calls.
