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PROLOG

       This  manual  page  is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The Linux implementation of
       this interface may differ (consult the corresponding Linux  manual  page  for  details  of
       Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

NAME

       man — display system documentation

SYNOPSIS

       man [-k] name...

DESCRIPTION

       The  man  utility  shall write information about each of the name operands. If name is the
       name of a standard utility, man at a minimum shall write a message describing  the  syntax
       used by the standard utility, its options, and operands. If more information is available,
       the man utility shall provide it in an implementation-defined manner.

       An implementation may provide information for values  of  name  other  than  the  standard
       utilities.  Standard  utilities  that are listed as optional and that are not supported by
       the implementation either shall cause a brief message indicating that fact to be displayed
       or shall cause a full display of information as described previously.

OPTIONS

       The  man  utility  shall  conform  to the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section
       12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines.

       The following option shall be supported:

       -k      Interpret name operands as keywords to be used in searching  a  utilities  summary
               database  that  contains a brief purpose entry for each standard utility and write
               lines from the summary database that match any of the keywords. The keyword search
               shall  produce  results  that  are  the  equivalent of the output of the following
               command:

                   grep -Ei '
                   name
                   name
                   ...
                   ' summary-database

               This assumes that the summary-database is a text file  with  a  single  entry  per
               line;  this  organization is not required and the example using grep -Ei is merely
               illustrative of the type of search intended. The purpose entry to be  included  in
               the database shall consist of a terse description of the purpose of the utility.

OPERANDS

       The following operand shall be supported:

       name      A  keyword  or the name of a standard utility. When -k is not specified and name
                 does not represent one of the standard utilities, the results are unspecified.

STDIN

       Not used.

INPUT FILES

       None.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       The following environment variables shall affect the execution of man:

       LANG      Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or
                 null.   (See   the   Base  Definitions  volume  of  POSIX.1‐2017,  Section  8.2,
                 Internationalization  Variables  for  the  precedence  of   internationalization
                 variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)

       LC_ALL    If  set  to  a  non-empty  string  value,  override  the values of all the other
                 internationalization variables.

       LC_CTYPE  Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of  text  data
                 as  characters  (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in
                 arguments and in the summary database). The value of LC_CTYPE  need  not  affect
                 the format of the information written about the name operands.

       LC_MESSAGES
                 Determine  the  locale  that should be used to affect the format and contents of
                 diagnostic messages written to standard error and informative  messages  written
                 to standard output.

       NLSPATH   Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.

       PAGER     Determine  an output filtering command for writing the output to a terminal. Any
                 string acceptable as a command_string operand to the  sh  -c  command  shall  be
                 valid.  When  standard  output  is  a terminal device, the reference page output
                 shall be piped through the command. If the PAGER variable is null  or  not  set,
                 the  command shall be either more or another paginator utility documented in the
                 system documentation.

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS

       Default.

STDOUT

       The man utility shall write text describing the syntax of the utility  name,  its  options
       and its operands, or, when -k is specified, lines from the summary database. The format of
       this text is implementation-defined.

STDERR

       The standard error shall be used for  diagnostic  messages,  and  may  also  be  used  for
       informational messages of unspecified format.

OUTPUT FILES

       None.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION

       None.

EXIT STATUS

       The following exit values shall be returned:

        0    Successful completion.

       >0    An error occurred.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS

       Default.

       The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE

       None.

EXAMPLES

       None.

RATIONALE

       It  is  recognized  that  the  man utility is only of minimal usefulness as specified. The
       opinion of the standard developers was strongly divided as  to  how  much  or  how  little
       information  man  should  be  required  to  provide.  They  considered,  however, that the
       provision of some portable way of accessing documentation would aid user portability.  The
       arguments against a fuller specification were:

        *  Large  quantities  of  documentation  should not be required on a system that does not
           have excess disk space.

        *  The current manual system does not present information in a manner that  greatly  aids
           user portability.

        *  A  ``better help system'' is currently an area in which vendors feel that they can add
           value to their POSIX implementations.

       The -f option was considered, but due to implementation differences, it was  not  included
       in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017.

       The  description  was  changed  to  be  more specific about what has to be displayed for a
       utility. The standard developers considered it insufficient to allow a display of only the
       synopsis without giving a short description of what each option and operand does.

       The  ``purpose''  entry to be included in the database can be similar to the section title
       (less the numeric prefix) from this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 for each utility.  These titles
       are similar to those used in historical systems for this purpose.

       See mailx for rationale concerning the default paginator.

       The  caveat  in the LC_CTYPE description was added because it is not a requirement that an
       implementation provide reference pages for all of its supported locales  on  each  system;
       changing LC_CTYPE does not necessarily translate the reference page into another language.
       This is equivalent to the current state  of  LC_MESSAGES  in  POSIX.1‐2008—locale-specific
       messages are not yet a requirement.

       The  historical  MANPATH  variable  is not included in POSIX because no attempt is made to
       specify naming conventions for reference page files, nor even to  mandate  that  they  are
       files  at all. On some implementations they could be a true database, a hypertext file, or
       even fixed strings within the man  executable.  The  standard  developers  considered  the
       portability of reference pages to be outside their scope of work. However, users should be
       aware that MANPATH is implemented on a number of historical systems and  that  it  can  be
       used  to  tailor  the  search  pattern  for  reference  pages  from the various categories
       (utilities, functions, file formats, and so on) when the system administrator reveals  the
       location and conventions for reference pages on the system.

       The  keyword search can rely on at least the text of the section titles from these utility
       descriptions, and the implementation may add more keywords. The  term  ``section  titles''
       refers to the strings such as:

           man — Display system documentation
           ps — Report process status

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

       None.

SEE ALSO

       more

       The  Base  Definitions  volume  of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 8, Environment Variables, Section
       12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines

COPYRIGHT

       Portions of this text are reprinted and  reproduced  in  electronic  form  from  IEEE  Std
       1003.1-2017,  Standard  for  Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface
       (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C)  2018  by
       the  Institute  of  Electrical  and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group.  In the
       event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE  and  The  Open  Group
       Standard,  the  original  IEEE  and  The  Open Group Standard is the referee document. The
       original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

       Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most  likely  to  have
       been  introduced  during  the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report
       such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .