Fedora Linux

1	User commands
2	System calls
3	Library functions
4	Special files
5	File formats
6	Games
7	Conventions and miscellany
8	Administration and privileged commands

To view the manpage for a particular command, such as ls :

$ man ls

The output will appear as shown in Figure 4-1 . You can use the up and down arrow keys and the Page Up/Page Down keys to scroll through the text, or q to quit. You can also type / , enter some text, and press Enter to search for that text within the document; type n (lowercase n , for next ) to search again. ? and N (uppercase N ) can be used in the same way to search backwards.

Figure 4-1. Online display of a manpage

To request a manpage from a specific section of the manual, give the section as the first argument and the name of the manpage as the second argument:

$ man 2 uname

If you don't specify the section, the first section containing a page with the requested name is usedand since there is a uname page in section 1, you won't see the page from section 2 unless you specifically ask for it.

4.2.1.2. Finding a manpage

The -k argument of man is used to produce a list of all of the pages that contain a specific keyword in their short descriptions. For example, if you wanted to see all of the manpages that contained the word calendar in their summary:

$ man -k calendar
Date::Calc (3pm) - Gregorian calendar date calculations
Date::Calendar (3pm) - Calendar objects for different holiday schemes
Date::Calendar::Profiles (3pm) - Some sample profiles for Date::Calendar and
Date::Calendar::Year
Date::Calendar::Year (3pm) - Implements embedded year objects for Date::Calendar
cal (1) - displays a calendar

Note that the section number is in parentheses. If you were looking for a calendar command, you could ignore the results from section 3 of the manual (library functions), which leaves just one possibility: the cal command. You could then get more information about that command to see if it will do what you need :

$ man cal

apropos is another name for man -k. To my ear, it has more class! 

To see all of the manpages with a specific name in all sections of the manual, use the whatis command:

$ whatis uname
uname (1) - print system information
uname (2) - get name and information about current kernel

In this case, you can see that there is a page for uname in section 1 and 2 of the manual.

4.2.1.3. Reading info documents

The GNU project supplies most of its documentation in info documents rather than manpages. info documents are a unique form of hypertext and are read with a reader program named, not surprisingly, info :

$ info ls

info has many features and can be a bit overwhelming. Each document consists of nodes (analogous to web pages) that are linked together using menu options. The keys listed in Table 4-3 are sufficient for basic navigation.

Table 4-3. Basic navigation in info

Key