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     purpose

             fragment    none       html           print only body
             includes    string     html           path to header files
             indent      integer    ascii, utf8    left margin
             man         string     html           path for Xr links
             paper       string     ps, pdf        paper size
             style       string     html           CSS file
             toc         none       html           print table of contents
             width       integer    ascii, utf8    right margin

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>