Posted by James Durbin on 1999-11-16
Morris Know wrote: > > I know that something like attributes(5) the (5) means it is in Man5 > documentation. I was wondering though, what are all those different man > page sets. There must be over 40 of them, sman, man, man5, man3X, etc... > Why are they divided into these catagories and what do those differnet > catagories mean? > Yeah, this is kinda not programming stuff, but in a way it is since I find > lots of programming syntax and such in man pages. If I remember correctly what group a man page is in depends on what is contained in that man page. All the programming man pages are in on group, utilities are in another, games in another, etc... it's a way of being able to differenciate between a program named something like 'printf' and the C function 'printf'... you want the man page for the function but not the program, so you do a 'man <the programming group's #> printf' and man will look only in that certain man group for the 'printf' man page... -- /* From: James H. Durbin Email: divine-bovine@xxxx.xxx */
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