How do I use man?

One way to find out information about particular programs or commands on your UNIX system is to type man program at your system prompt, where program is the name of the command you want to read about. The man pages are on-line copies of UNIX documentation.

For example, to find out about the who command:

	% man who

If UNIX responded with "No manual entry for command", then that command is not available on this system or a manual page is not available.

Another good tool is the apropos command. If you type apropos passwd a list of all man pages that contain passwd in their name field will be returned. For example:

	% apropos passwd

You will get this output:

lwpasswd (1L)		- changes your Laserwriter account password
passwd (5)		- password file
passwd, chfn, chsh (1)	- change password file information
passwd.adjunct (5)	- user security data file
rfpasswd (8)		- change RFS host password
xcrypt, xencrypt, xdecrypt, 
passwd2des (3R) 	- hex encryption and utility routines
yppasswd (1)		- change your network password in the NIS database
yppasswd (3R)		- update user password in NIS
yppasswd (5)		- NIS password file
yppasswdd, rpc.yppasswdd (8C)	- server for modifying NIS password file
ups.ecn.purdue.edu% 

You can then use man to view the manual page for the specific command you want. You can also type:

	% man man

to get more information on how man works.