Unix Manual Pagesby Theo Verelst
man [-k] [-s {on some systems}] [section] pageThe 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 typeman psand 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 manto 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 combinations SEE ALSO cross reference to related commandsand possibly:
BUGS obviously: known bugs or limitations ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES the command uses or affects.One can use
man -k <keyword>to search for keyword in all manual page headers and get a list of results per line. In such usage lines, it used to be standard to take <> as indicating literals, and g 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/makewhatisUnder linux I guess that could be /sbin/makewhatis, probably only accessible 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 separately (annoying when running a 1600x1200 workstation like setup wanting some things small 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 <space> for a new screen, <newline> to scroll one line, and <b> 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. The standard documentation is also present under Windows, even in the absence of Cygwin, but there the easiest access is through [describe how to navigate to Tcl Help].
Tcllib contains doctools as one way of writing documentation that can then be converted into man page (as well as other) formats.
See also A little man page viewer as well as tkman.
LV TkMan is a wonderful tool, once you set it all up. Be certain to install the auxiliary tools to make it as powerful as possible.
TV (june 28 '04) I'm making a Tcl/Tk man pages comments page .
LV I don't know why we need so many variations on this topic. It seems to me that one of these should be chosen, the contents of the other pages moved there, and then references to the other pages changed to the one page to rule them all ... so to speak.
