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How to use Man

The man command prints pages of the UNIX Programmers Manual on the screen. Each page, called "a man page," describes one command. To use the man command, type the following:

man command

The man command responds by printing on the screen the man page for the command you typed in place of command. For example, if you wished to learn more about the man command, you could try:

man man

Once you have a man page on your screen, you'll want to know the information listed below.

• If you need help while looking at the man page, you can type a ? to get more information.

• If the man page is more than one page long, you'll need to press the space bar to see the next and all subsequent pages.

• If you're looking for something specific in the man page (for example, the description of a particular option), you can have man find a particular word (say, that option name) by typing the following: /pattern The man command will go to where it first finds the word you typed in place of pattern. To get man to look for the next occurrence of that word, simply type a slash (/) by itself.

• If you don't want to look at the entire man page, you can quit by typing ctrl-c or, if the : prompt is on your screen, by typing q.

If you don't know the exact name of the UNIX command you're looking for, you can use: man -k something man -k responds by printing on the screen a list of all the commands it finds that are similar to the word you typed in place of something or that contain that word in the description of the command. You can then use the man command to get information about the command you're interested in.

For example, here are the results of using man -k compiler to find compiler man pages.

cccp, cpp (1)        - The GNU C-Compatible Compiler Preprocessor.
g++ (1)              - GNU project C++ Compiler (v2 preliminary)
gcc, g++ (1)         - GNU project C and C++ Compiler (v2 preliminary)
cc (1v)              - C compiler
error (1)            - categorize compiler error messages, insert at
                       responsible source file lines
rpcgen (1)           - RPC protocol compiler
tic (8v)             - terminfo compiler
yacc (1)             - yet another compiler-compiler
zic (8)              - time zone compiler
bdftosnf (1)         - BDF to SNF font compiler for X11
cfc (8)              - Sendmail cf file compiler
ease (8)             - precompiler for sendmail configuration files
f77 (1)              - Sun FORTRAN compiler
f90 (1)              - Fortran 90 compiler
fp (1)               - Functional Programming language compiler/interpreter
fpc (1)              - fp to C compiler
orc (1)              - The Oregon C++ compiler 
pc (1)               - Pascal compiler
sicstus2.1 (1)       - SICS Prolog compiler/interpreter
sml, smld, smlc (1)  - Standard ML compiler

Then you can look at the man page for the C compiler, called cc, by typing: man cc

This command should come up with a page with the following sections:

NAME

command---brief description of what it does

SYNOPSIS

command op files: what the command has to offer and how it is invoked/used.

DESCRIPTION

a more in-depth explanation of what the command has to offer as well as to give examples of how to use the command. In this section you will also get the explanation of what options the command has and how to properly use them.

FILES

this is a list of the files which the command utilizes to perform correctly.

SEE ALSO

these are references to other commands that can give related information on the topic you are referencing.

There are other sections that are sometimes used: WARNINGS, BUGS, and others.

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