Format
- man [–wx]
[–M path] [section] entry …
- man –k [–M path] keyword …
Description
man displays
help information about both shell commands and the z/OS® UNIX set
of TSO/E commands. You can use it to search help files having the
specified keywords associated with them.
Options
- –k
- Searches a precomputed database of syntax lines for information
about keywords.
- –M path
- Searches the directories indicated by path for
help files. If –M is not specified, man uses
the path specified in the MANPATH environment variable if set; otherwise man searches /usr/man/%L.
The value of the LANG environment variable is substituted for %L
in this directory and in the directories specified by MANPATH. All
help files are found by searching similarly structured file trees
rooted at one or more places. See Files for
a description of what files and directories man should
find in each directory that it searches.
- –w
- Displays only the filename of the file containing the help file.
- –x
- Displays what files man is
searching to find the help file. –x also
displays any errors that man encounters
while extracting man pages from online book files. See BookServer exit values.
- section
- Is a number (0–9) representing a section of the online help. When
you specify a section number, man searches
only that section for entry, instead of searching all sections. The
online help available for z/OS UNIX contains
one section:
1 Commands
To find a given entry, man checks
each directory in MANPATH for a file with a specific name. For each
section number requested, man searches MANPATH
for the following files in this order:
- catn/entry.n in each directory in MANPATH
- entry.n in /var/man/LANG (the man "cache")
- mann/*.book in each directory in MANPATH
- mann/entry.n in each directory in MANPATH
If no section number is specified then man searches
all sections in order from 1 to 9, then 0. The first entry found by man is
the one displayed.
If output is to the terminal, then
man invokes
a pager command to filter and display the manual pages. If MANPAGER
is defined, it is used. If not, then if PAGER is defined, it is used;
otherwise,
man defaults to using the command:
pg –e –p '(Page %d)'
If
you are running in a double-byte locale, set MANPAGER or PAGER to
invoke a command which supports double-byte characters, such as the more command.
pg does not support double-byte characters.
Examples
To find out which utilities do
comparisons, issue:
man –k compare
You
can use the
man command to view manual descriptions
of the z/OS UNIX set of TSO/E commands. To do this, you
must prefix all commands with
tso. For example, to view a
description of the z/OS UNIX variation of the MOUNT command,
you would enter:
man tsomount
You
can also use the
man command to view manual
descriptions of commands that support subcommands. To do this, you
must prefix all subcommands with the name of the command. For example,
to view a description of the
dbx alias subcommand,
you would enter:
man dbxalias
The same applies
for the
pdbx subcommands. For example, enter:
man pdbxcont
to
display information about the
cont subcommand.
To
view an online manual description for the tcsh
ls-F built-in
command, you must type
ls-F without the
dash. So, to see the man page you would issue:
man lsF
To
view an online manual description for the tcsh
@ (at) built-in
command, you must type
at with tcsh in front
of it. So, to see the man page you would issue:
man tcshat
Environment variables
man uses
the following environment variables:
- MANPATH
- Contains a list
of paths to search for man pages.
- MANPAGER, PAGER
- Contains
an output filtering command for use when displaying man pages on a
terminal.
If
you are running in a double-byte locale, verify that this variable
is set to a command which supports double-byte characters, such as
the more command.
- TMPDIR
- Identifies the
directory where temporary files reside.
Localization
man uses
the following localization environment variables:
- LANG
- LC_ALL
- LC_CTYPE
- LC_MESSAGES
- NLSPATH
See Localization for more
information.
Files
man uses
the following files:
- /usr/man/%L/man[0–9]/*.book
- BookManager® book files containing man
pages.
- /var/man/%L/entry.[0–9]/*.bookname
- Cached man pages extracted
from book files.
- /usr/man/%L/cat[0–9]/ * .[0–9]
- Subdirectories containing formatted help files.
- /usr/man/%L/whatis
- Database used by –k option.
Exit values
- 0
- Topic not found.
- 1
- Topic contents exceeded the buffer length.
- -1
- No errors.
BookServer exit values
If
the -x option was specified and man encounters
errors while extracting man pages from online book files, these exit
values are displayed.
- 112105
- The bookread component of BookServer could not locate or read
the partitioned dataset of the code page translation tables. Check
the bookread configuration as described in the z/OS program directory and the BookServer program
directory.
- 100000-199999
- An error occurred while opening the bookread session.
- 200000-299999
- An error occurred while opening the book.
- 300000-399999
- An error occurred while translating the topicid to unicode.
- 400000-499999
- An error occurred while positioning to the topic within the book
file.
- 500000-599999
- An error occurred while reading a line of the topic.
- 600000-699999
- An error occurred while translating the text of the book from
the internal book code page to the display code page errors.
- 700000-799999
- An error occurred while closing the book file.
- 800000-899999
- An error occurred while closing the session.
- 900000-999999
- An error occurred while positioning to the top of the book file.
- 1000000-1099999
- An error occurred while looking up the CONTENTS topic ID.
Portability
POSIX.2 User Portability Extension, X/Open Portability Guide, UNIX systems.
The
elements of the environment variable MANPATH are
separated by colons.
The –M option,
the –x option, the –w option,
the MANPAGER environment variable, the default pager,
and the ability to specify section on the
command line are all extensions to the POSIX standard.
Related information
help, more