man-pages

What does the number in brackets shown after unix command names mean ?

E.g man(1), find(3), updatedb(2) ? what do these numbers mean ? ...

Manpage scandir() prototype weirdness

I have a problem with scandir(): The manpage contains this as prototype: int scandir(const char *dir, struct dirent ***namelist, int (*filter)(const struct dirent *), int (*compar)(const struct dirent **, const struct dirent **)); Therefore I have this: static inline int RubyCompare(const struct dirent **a, const struct dirent ...

Best practices to put into a man page

Is there a best practices guideline for writing man pages? What should be included in the layout? The standard ones are: NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION EXAMPLES SEE ALSO There are others like OPTIONS, AUTHOR. As a user what would be useful to have? What isn't helpful? ...

Where is the 'man' Program for Windows (Program to open UNIX man pages)?

I'm looking for the windows executable for the linux man (manual reader). I tried googling around, but got frustrated with the kind of results it came up with, owing to 'man' being such a common phrase. I got results that read "man executed in texas..". So I look to the SO community now. Any clues? ...

Best way to author man pages?

What's the best way to author man pages? Should I write using the standard man macros, or is there some clever package available now that takes some kind of XML-ified source and can output man pages, HTML, ASCII, and what not? Thanks ...

Is there a command to search for a string within all man pages installed in the man-db

I know that if I can't remember a command I can just look it up on Google. But this should be possible from the shell itself. If I could output all the man-pages, I could run a grep on them and find what I was looking for. Is there a simple command line man-search-engine out there that indexes all the words in all the man pages and let...