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 override the
determined value, use this option to supply a locale string directly to man. Note that it will not take effect until the search for pages actually begins. Output such as the help message will always be dis‐
played in the initially determined locale.
-m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
If this system has access to other operating systems’ manual pages, they can be accessed using this option. To search for a manual page from NewOS’s manual page collection, use the option -m NewOS.
The system specified can be a combination of comma delimited operating system names. To include a search of the native operating system’s manual pages, include the system name man in the argument string. This
option will override the $SYSTEM environment variable.
-M path, --manpath=path
Specify an alternate manpath to use. By default, man uses manpath derived code to determine the path to search. This option overrides the $MANPATH environment variable and causes option -m to be ignored.
A path specified as a manpath must be the root of a manual page hierarchy structured into sections as described in the man‐db manual (under "The manual page system"). To view manual pages outside such hierar‐
chies, see the -l option.
-S list, -s list, --sections=list
The given list is a colon‐ or comma‐separated list of sections, used to determine which manual sections to search and in what order. This option overrides the $MANSECT environment variable. (The -s spelling
is for compatibility with System V.)
-e sub‐extension, --extension=sub‐extension
Some systems incorporate large packages of manual pages, such as those that accompany the Tcl package, into the main manual page hierarchy. To get around the problem of having two manual pages with the same
name such as exit(3), the Tcl pages were usually all assigned to section l. As this is unfortunate, it is now possible to put the pages in the correct section, and to assign a specific "extension" to them, in
this case, exit(3tcl). Under normal operation, man will display exit(3) in preference to exit(3tcl). To negotiate this situation and to avoid having to know which section the page you require resides in, it
is now possible to give man a sub‐extension string indicating which package the page must belong to. Using the above example, supplying the option -e tcl to man will restrict the search to pages having an ex‐
tension of *tcl.
-i, --ignore-case
Ignore case when searching for manual pages. This is the default.
-I, --match-case
Search for manual pages case‐sensitively.
--regex
Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions matching each page argument as a regular