DESCRIPTION
man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given
to man is normally the name of a program, utility or func‐
tion. The manual page associated with each of these argu‐
ments is then found and displayed. A section, if provided,
will direct man to look only in that section of the manual.
The default action is to search in all of the available sec‐
tions following a pre-defined order ("1 n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm
3perl 5 4 9 6 7" by default, unless overridden by the SEC‐
TION directive in /etc/manpath.config), and to show only the
first page found, even if page exists in several sections.
The table below shows the section numbers of the manual fol‐
lowed by the types of pages they contain.
1 Executable programs or shell commands
2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3 Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conven‐
tions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
8 System administration commands (usually only for root)
9 Kernel routines [Non standard]
A manual page consists of several sections.
The default action is to search in all of the available sections follow‐
ing a pre-defined order ("1 n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7" by default, unless overrid‐
den by the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config)