The man command is used to view a system’s reference manuals(man pages). The command gives users access to manual pages for command-line utilities and tools.
man <flag> <command/tool name>Here is the example output for man ftp that explains the usage of ftp command. type q to exit from the manual screen
Each manual page is divided into sections: NAME, SYNOPSIS, CONFIGURATION, DESCRIPTION, OPTIONS, EXIT STATUS, RETURN VALUE, ERRORS, FILES, VERSIONS, NOTES, BUGS, EXAMPLE, AUTHORS, and SEE ALSO.
if you want to search for any manuals that include a name, command line option ‘f’ that allows man to display all manual pages that match the name in the input.
Anothere example for sort is mentioned in lp, l and 3pm manuals
These manuals can further be explored
As already mentioned in the beginning, all available manual pages are segregated into sections, and there are sections that contain man page entries of same name. To make things easier for you, the man command lets you directly access manual pages from specific sections, something which you can do by just specifying the section number before the command/tool name.
man [section-num] [command/tool name]For example:
man 3 printf