On , I learnt ...
What the sections of the Unix manual are
From man man
:
MANUAL SECTIONS
The standard sections of the manual include:
1 User Commands
2 System Calls
3 C Library Functions
4 Devices and Special Files
5 File Formats and Conventions
6 Games et. Al.
7 Miscellanea
8 System Administration tools and Deamons
You can see the sections that have pages for a given query with man -f
or
whatis
. E.g.
$ man -f passwd
passwd(1) - modify a user's password
passwd(5), master.passwd(5) - format of the password file
slapd-passwd(5) - /etc/passwd backend to slapd
The section number is in parentheses. These can be used to open a man page from a particular section. Use:
man 1 passwd
to learn about how to use the passwd
command and:
man 5 passwd
to learn about the format of the password file.