[PLUG] man sections

Eric Wilhelm ewilhelm at sbcglobal.net
Thu Mar 24 23:29:58 UTC 2005


# The following was supposedly scribed by
# Jason Van Cleve
# on Thursday 24 March 2005 04:23 pm:

Assuming this was intended for the list...

>> man page under "4x".
>>
>>   man -S 4x mouse
>
>What's that -S option do, pray tell?  I'm reading "colon separated
>section list" in the help, but what's "4x"?

That's a section name.

  ls /usr/share/man/

  ls /usr/X11R6/man/

(Finding the corresponding directory on a not-sarge system is left as an 
exercise for the reader.)  Notice that things are split into 
directories.  I don't think that really matters.  Rather I think man 
refers to the .4x in the filenames like "mouse.4x.gz".  So, when you 
say 'whatis mouse' or 'apropos mouse' and see (4) or (3ncurses) or 
(4x), those are the section numbers.  In the case of 'whatis mouse', 
you get:

  mouse (4)            - serial mouse interface
  mouse (3ncurses)     - mouse interface through curses
  mouse (4x)           - Mouse input driver
  
Which means that 'man mouse' is just going to give you the first and 
with 'man -a mouse' you would have to cycle through them one at a time, 
so use "-S 4x" to say "Show me the manpage for 'mouse' from section 
4x."

I guess the other directories are for locales.  If you're really 
interested, read more of 'man man'.

  man -L ko -S 5 passwd

I happen to really like the man system.  Not sure why gnu "shuns it so" 
in favor of info (I guess that's the cathedral talking.)  Really wish 
kde had man pages.

I learned most of what I know from man and apropos.  If you can't find 
it there, you either need to find the howto or what you want to do 
hasn't been done before.  Maybe it's not the easiest way to learn a 
system, but you're less likely to be deceived or underinformed (and 
your understanding of what's really going on will be better) if you get 
your knowledge straight from the source (I learned most of what I know 
about Perl from perldoc, and that keeps me from falling into a lot of 
common traps.)  Okay.  Time to load this soapbox onto the truck so...

  http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6282

--Eric
-- 
"Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse." 
                                       -- Murphy's Corollary
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