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 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. However, 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 displayed in the initially determined
locale.
-m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
If this system has access to other operating system's
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 hierarchies, 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 extension
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 expression, as with apropos(1). Since there is
usually no reasonable way to pick a "best" page when
searching for a regular expression, this option implies
-a.
--wildcard
Show all pages with any part of either their names or
their descriptions matching each page argument using
shell-style wildcards, as with apropos(1) --wildcard. The
page argument must match the entire name or description,
or match on word boundaries in the description. Since
there is usually no reasonable way to pick a "best" page
when searching for a wildcard, this option implies -a.
--names-only
If the --regex or --wildcard option is used, match only
page names, not page descriptions, as with whatis(1).
Otherwise, no effect.
-a, --all
By default, man will exit after displaying the most
suitable manual page it finds. Using this option forces
man to display all the manual pages with names that match
the search criteria.
-u, --update
This option causes man to update its database caches of
installed manual pages. This is only needed in rare
situations, and it is normally better to run mandb(8)
instead.
--no-subpages
By default, man will try to interpret pairs of manual page
names given on the command line as equivalent to a single
manual page name containing a hyphen or an underscore.
This supports the common pattern of programs that
implement a number of subcommands, allowing them to
provide manual pages for each that can be accessed using
similar syntax as would be used to invoke the subcommands
themselves. For example:
$ man -aw git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git-diff.1.gz
To disable this behaviour, use the --no-subpages option.
$ man -aw --no-subpages git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/Git.3pm.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/diff.1.gz
Controlling formatted output
-P pager, --pager=pager
Specify which output pager to use. By default, man uses
less, falling back to cat if less is not found or is not
executable. This option overrides the $MANPAGER
environment variable, which in turn overrides the $PAGER
environment variable. It is not used in conjunction with
-f or -k.
The value may be a simple command name or a command with
arguments, and may use shell quoting (backslashes, single
quotes, or double quotes). It may not use pipes to
connect multiple commands; if you need that, use a wrapper
script, which may take the file to display either as an
argument or on standard input.
-r prompt, --prompt=prompt
If a recent version of less is used as the pager, man will
attempt to set its prompt and some sensible options. The
default prompt looks like
Manual page name(sec) line x
where name denotes the manual page name, sec denotes the
section it was found under and x the current line number.
This is achieved by using the $LESS environment variable.
Supplying -r with a string will override this default.
The string may contain the text $MAN_PN which will be
expanded to the name of the current manual page and its
section name surrounded by "(" and ")". The string used
to produce the default could be expressed as
\ Manual\ page\ \$MAN_PN\ ?ltline\ %lt?L/%L.:
byte\ %bB?s/%s..?\ (END):?pB\ %pB\\%..
(press h for help or q to quit)
It is broken into three lines here for the sake of
readability only. For its meaning see the less(1) manual
page. The prompt string is first evaluated by the shell.
All double quotes, back-quotes and backslashes in the
prompt must be escaped by a preceding backslash. The
prompt string may end in an escaped $ which may be
followed by further options for less. By default man sets
the -ix8 options.
The $MANLESS environment variable described below may be
used to set a default prompt string if none is supplied on
the command line.
-7, --ascii
When viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7 bit
terminal or terminal emulator, some characters may not
display correctly when using the latin1(7) device
description with GNU nroff. This option allows pure ascii
manual pages to be displayed in ascii with the latin1
device. It will not translate any latin1 text. The
following table shows the translations performed: some
parts of it may only be displayed properly when using GNU
nroff's latin1(7) device.
Description Octal latin1 ascii
────────────────────────────────────────
continuation 255 ‐ -
hyphen
bullet (middle 267 • o
dot)
acute accent 264 ´ '
multiplication 327 × x
sign
If the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal may
be set up for latin1 characters and this option is not
necessary. If the latin1 and ascii columns are identical,
you are reading this page using this option or man did not
format this page using the latin1 device description. If
the latin1 column is missing or corrupt, you may need to
view manual pages with this option.
This option is ignored when using options -t, -H, -T, or
-Z and may be useless for nroff other than GNU's.
-E encoding, --encoding=encoding
Generate output for a character encoding other than the
default. For backward compatibility, encoding may be an
nroff device such as ascii, latin1, or utf8 as well as a
true character encoding such as UTF-8.
--no-hyphenation, --nh
Normally, nroff will automatically hyphenate text at line
breaks even in words that do not contain hyphens, if it is
necessary to do so to lay out words on a line without
excessive spacing. This option disables automatic
hyphenation, so words will only be hyphenated if they
already contain hyphens.
If you are writing a manual page and simply want to
prevent nroff from hyphenating a word at an inappropriate
point, do not use this option, but consult the nroff
documentation instead; for instance, you can put "\%"
inside a word to indicate that it may be hyphenated at
that point, or put "\%" at the start of a word to prevent
it from being hyphenated.
--no-justification, --nj
Normally, nroff will automatically justify text to both
margins. This option disables full justification, leaving
justified only to the left margin, sometimes called
"ragged-right" text.
If you are writing a manual page and simply want to
prevent nroff from justifying certain paragraphs, do not
use this option, but consult the nroff documentation
instead; for instance, you can use the ".na", ".nf",
".fi", and ".ad" requests to temporarily disable adjusting
and filling.
-p string, --preprocessor=string
Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff
or troff/groff. Not all installations will have a full
set of preprocessors. Some of the preprocessors and the
letters used to designate them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic
(p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), refer (r). This option
overrides the $MANROFFSEQ environment variable. zsoelim
is always run as the very first preprocessor.
-t, --troff
Use groff -mandoc to format the manual page to stdout.
This option is not required in conjunction with -H, -T, or
-Z.
-T[device], --troff-device[=device]
This option is used to change groff (or possibly troff's)
output to be suitable for a device other than the default.
It implies -t. Examples (provided with Groff-1.17)
include dvi, latin1, ps, utf8, X75 and X100.
-H[browser], --html[=browser]
This option will cause groff to produce HTML output, and
will display that output in a web browser. The choice of
browser is determined by the optional browser argument if
one is provided, by the $BROWSER environment variable, or
by a compile-time default if that is unset (usually lynx).
This option implies -t, and will only work with GNU troff.
-X[dpi], --gxditview[=dpi]
This option displays the output of groff in a graphical
window using the gxditview program. The dpi (dots per
inch) may be 75, 75-12, 100, or 100-12, defaulting to 75;
the -12 variants use a 12-point base font. This option
implies -T with the X75, X75-12, X100, or X100-12 device
respectively.
-Z, --ditroff
groff will run troff and then use an appropriate post-
processor to produce output suitable for the chosen
device. If groff -mandoc is groff, this option is passed
to groff and will suppress the use of a post-processor.
It implies -t.
Getting help
-?, --help
Print a help message and exit.
--usage
Print a short usage message and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information.
