man

Incredible program manuals available without a search engine.

Examples

View manual for programs / configuration files

• man ssh
• man sshd_config
• man jail.conf

View a specific section’s manual for pipe

• man 2 pipe
• man 7 pipe

Tips

When you install a new program with pacman or apt, it will normally include manuals for its executables, config files, and more.

If you are unsure of how to use an executable, consider checking if it has a manpage with

man <executable name>

The same goes for configuration files.

man <config file name>

• Typically, configuration file man page names exclude the /etc/program/ part of the file path. i.e. the manpage for /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf is man jail.conf

The manpage will include information on how to use the executable like command-line parameters, expected inputs/outputs, and exit codes.

Section Numbers

per man 1 man, where 1 is the section number

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, e.g. /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]

Pager

Manuals will be paged using the pager specified in $MANPAGER or $PAGER. On a normal install, this is less