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
                      toc        none      html
                      width      integer   ascii, utf8

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

SEE ALSO

       apropos(1), man(1), makewhatis(8)

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

       Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>