languages, controlled by your locale. If your system did not set this up for you automatically, then you may need to set $LC_MESSAGES, $LANG, or another system‐dependent
environment variable to indicate your preferred locale, usually specified in the POSIX format:
<language>[_<territory>[.<character‐set>[,<version>]]]
If the desired page is available in your locale, it will be displayed in lieu of the standard (usually American English) page.
If you find that the translations supplied with this package are not available in your native language and you would like to supply them, please contact the maintainer who will be coordinating such activity.
Individual manual pages are normally written and maintained by the maintainers of the program, function, or other topic that they document, and are not included with this package. If you find that a manual page is
missing or inadequate, please report that to the maintainers of the package in question.
For information regarding other features and extensions available with this manual pager, please read the documents supplied with the package.
DEFAULTS
The order of sections to search may be overridden by the environment variable $MANSECT or by the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config. By default it is as follows:
1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 3posix 3pm 3perl 3am 5 4 9 6 7
The formatted manual page is displayed using a pager. This can be specified in a number of ways, or else will fall back to a default (see option -P for details).
The filters are deciphered by a number of means. Firstly, the command line option -p or the environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is interrogated. If -p was not used and the environment variable was not set, the initial
line of the nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string. To contain a valid preprocessor string, the first line must resemble
’\" <string>
where string can be any combination of letters described by option -p below.
If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default set is used.
A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary formatter (nroff or [tg]roff with -t) and executed. Alternatively, if an executable program mandb_nfmt (or mandb_tfmt with -t) exists in the man tree
root, it is executed instead. It gets passed the manual source file, the preprocessor string, and optionally the device specified with -T or -E as arguments.
OPTIONS
Non‐argument options that are duplicated either on the command line, in $MANOPT, or both, are not harmful. For options that require an argument, each duplication will override the previous argument value.
General options
-C file, --config-file=file
Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.
-d, --debug
Print debugging information.
-D, --default
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