man sections

Question

How do I access specific sections of man pages?

Answer 1

Put the section number in front of the item you want to reference. For example, to access the sysctl function from the library section, you can write:

man 3 sysctl

and to access the sysctl tool from the system administrator's section, you would write:

man 8 sysctl

Answer 2

To add to what Jason said: if you're not sure what section something is in, you can also see all of the man pages for a given topic by typing

man -a topic

This is useful for topics such as printf, for which there is both a command and a C function that do similar things.

Answer 3

use the -s flag, for example:

man -s 2 read

you might like to look at

man intro

to get an idea of what's where.

HTH.

cheers,

Rob