Man Page Options: Reset, Warnings, Search, Location, and Encoding

This option is normally issued as the very first option and resets man’s behaviour to its default. Its use is to reset those options that may have been set in $MANOPT. Any options that follow -D will have their usual effect. --warnings[=warnings] Enable warnings from groff. This may be used to perform sanity checks on the source text of manual pages. warnings is a comma‐separated list of warning names; if it is not supplied, the default is "mac". See the “Warnings” node in info groff for a list of available warning names. Main modes of operation -f, --whatis Equivalent to whatis. Display a short description from the manual page, if available. See whatis(1) for details. -k, --apropos Equivalent to apropos. Search the short manual page descriptions for keywords and display any matches. See apropos(1) for details. -K, --global-apropos Search for text in all manual pages. This is a brute‐force search, and is likely to take some time; if you can, you should specify a section to reduce the number of pages that need to be searched. Search terms may be simple strings (the default), or regular expressions if the --regex option is used. Note that this searches the sources of the manual pages, not the rendered text, and so may include false positives due to things like comments in source files. Searching the rendered text would be much slower. -l, --local-file Activate "local" mode. Format and display local manual files instead of searching through the system’s manual collection. Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source file in the correct format. No cat file is produced. If ’-’ is listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from stdin. When this option is not used, and man fails to find the page required, before displaying the error message, it attempts to act as if this option was supplied, using the name as a filename and looking for an exact match. -w, --where, --path, --location Don’t actually display the manual page, but do print the location of the source nroff file that would be formatted. If the -a option is also used, then print the locations of all source files that match the search criteria. -W, --where-cat, --location-cat Don’t actually display the manual page, but do print the location of the preformatted cat file that would be displayed. If the -a option is also used, then print the locations of all preformatted cat files that match the search criteria. If -w and -W are both used, then print both source file and cat file separated by a space. If all of -w, -W, and -a are used, then do this for each possible match. -c, --catman This option is not for general use and should only be used by the catman program. -R encoding, --recode=encoding Instead of formatting the manual page in the usual way, output its source converted to the specified encoding. If you already know the encoding of the source file, you can also use manconv(1) directly. How‐ ever, this option allows you to convert several manual pages to a single encoding without having to explicitly state the encoding of each, provided that they were already installed in a structure similar to a manual page hierarchy. Consider using man‐recode(1) instead for converting multiple manual pages, since it has an interface designed for bulk conversion and so can be much faster. Finding manual pages -L locale, --locale=locale man will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C function setlocale(3) which interrogates various environment variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To temporarily

This section details options for the `man` command, including resetting to default behavior (`-D`), enabling groff warnings (`--warnings`), searching manual pages with `whatis` (`-f`), `apropos` (`-k`), and `global-apropos` (`-K`). It also covers options for locating manual page source files (`-w`) and cat files (`-W`), converting manual page encoding (`-R`), and specifying the locale (`-L`). The catman option is mentioned for internal use.