See also: Man
man is an order available on the operating systems of the type Unix. It makes it possible to view the handbook of an order.
It must be used in the following form:
man
For example, to see the handbook of the order ftp, man ftp should be typed.
To sail in a page, it is generally necessary to upwards use the arrows and to the bottom or the keys page down and page up , or the key of spacing, according to the pager used. One generally leaves a page with the key Q, but, for certain versions, it is necessary to press on the key of spacing until one arrives at the end of the page of handbook.
The pages of the Unix handbook are divided into several sections. For example, under Linux, one finds the following sections:
Each section has a page of introduction which presents the section, available by typing man
The pages of handbook are stored in the source files Nroff. Majority of the versions of man mask formatted versions of the last pages posted to accelerate next postings.
For more information on man, it is possible to look at the page man man, with the order man man.
At the time, the availability of a documentation on line using the pages of handbook was regarded as an important advance. For this day, virtually all the applications in line of order for Unix have had their own page of handbook. Many users of Unix feel the lack of page of handbook like a sign of bad quality. In fact, certain projects, such as Debian, write their clean pages of handbook for the orders which are deprived by it.
Little alternative to
However, the format of a single page per application, lack of classification in the sections, and the functionalities relatively little sophisticated page layout, justified the alternative system development of documentation such as the system
The majority of the applications graphics for UNIX (particularly those built for the environments GNOME and KDE) propose now documentation in HTML and include a tool to read these pages directly in the application.
The pages of handbooks are generally available in English. Translations in other languages are available for certain pages.
The format by defect of the pages of handbook is Troff, with either the macros man (directed presentation), or the macros mdoc (directed semantic). These format make possible the conversion of the pages of handbook in other formats like HTML, PostScript, etc
History
The Manuel of the programmer UNIX (UNIX Programmer' S Manual) was published the November 3rd 1971. This first page of handbook was written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Dolotta under the requests repeated of Doug McIlroy. The macros Troff used those were created for a general use by Ted Dolotta, like some addition for the pages of handbook.
man had same success, with the possible exception of the project GNU " information " , a simple and precursory system of Hypertext.
info already mentioned.
See also
External bonds
There exist several Web sites which publish the man pages. Here are some:
Random links: Alecto | Mesnois | Castinus | Abbey of Muckross | Mathias Trygg