Ubuntu Manpage: man.conf - configuration file for man

NAME

       man.conf - configuration file for man

DESCRIPTION

This is the configuration file for the man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8) utilities. Its presence,
and all directives, are optional.

This file is an ASCII text file. Leading whitespace on lines, lines starting with ‘#’, and blank lines
are ignored. Words are separated by whitespace. The first word on each line is the name of a
configuration directive.

The following directives are supported:

manpath path
Override the default search path for man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8). It can be used
multiple times to specify multiple paths, with the order determining the manual page search
order.

Each path is a tree containing subdirectories whose names consist of the strings ‘man’ and/or
‘cat’ followed by the names of sections, usually single digits. The former are supposed to
contain unformatted manual pages in mdoc(7) and/or man(7) format; file names should end with the
name of the section preceded by a dot. The latter should contain preformatted manual pages; file
names should end with ‘.0’.

Creating a mandoc.db(5) database with makewhatis(8) in each directory configured with manpath is
recommended and necessary for apropos(1) to work, and also for man(1) on operating systems like
OpenBSD that install each manual page with only one file name in the file system, even if it
documents multiple utilities or functions.

output option [value]
Configure the default value of an output option. These directives are overridden by the -O
command line options of the same names. For details, see the mandoc(1) manual.

option value used by -T
fragment none html
includes string html
indent integer ascii, utf8
man string html
paper string ps, pdf
style string html
width integer ascii, utf8

_whatdb path/whatis.db
This directive provides the same functionality as manpath, but using a historic and misleading
syntax. It is kept for backward compatibility for now, but will eventually be removed.

FILES

       /etc/man.conf

EXAMPLES

       The  following  configuration  file  reproduces the defaults: installing it is equivalent to not having a
       man.conf file at all.

             manpath /usr/share/man
             manpath /usr/X11R6/man
             manpath /usr/local/man

HISTORY

       A relatively complicated man.conf file format first appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.   For  OpenBSD 5.8,  it  was
       redesigned from scratch, aiming for simplicity.

AUTHORS