Questions tagged [man]

You may have been directed here because someone felt that you would have been better prepared to solve your issue without assistance if you'd had a better understanding of *NIX Manual (man) pages. This page is intended as a helpful guide toward understanding some of the tricks & lesser-known pitfalls of the man reference system. Please feel free to change/add to/replace this as needed!

Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
0 votes
1 answer
449 views

What is the maximum value acceptable for xargs -P argument? [duplicate]

In this answer they mention 10 I did man xargs and couldn't find what's the maximum limit. Is it possible to send 10000 cURL requests per second? How about 50000 cURL requests per second? I mean all ...
sofs1's user avatar
  • 103
0 votes
0 answers
50 views

less gives a bunch of files opened

I tried to open a file using less: less /home/me/Desktop/file1 This is returning unexpected result like this: /usr/bin/less: 1: [: missing ] At least one file or directory argument required. Use --...
Reynald Lamury's user avatar
-2 votes
2 answers
154 views

Error executing help manual pages on Fedora 25 for all kind of man pages

[user1@testMachine ~]$ lsb_release -a LSB Version: :core-4.1-amd64:core-4.1-noarch:cxx-4.1-amd64:cxx-4.1-noarch:desktop-4.1-amd64:desktop-4.1-noarch:languages-4.1-amd64:languages-4.1-noarch:...
shahjapan's user avatar
  • 141
25 votes
7 answers
3k views

How can I keep the content I was reading from man after I quit?

So we use man whatever to get usage and other info regarding the whatever command, when the relevant section of info is found, I'd like to quit the man command with the info left on screen. So I can ...
NathaneilCapital's user avatar
41 votes
5 answers
40k views

rsync 'cannot delete non-empty directory' errors, even with --force option

When running this command: $ sudo rsync -r --delete --force --checksum --exclude=uploads /data/prep/* /data/app/ I'm getting the following output: cannot delete non-empty directory: html/js/...
tommarshall's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
328 views

Why are Unix applications documented with an number in parenthesis with man?

When I try to get help on a Unix command, I get reference to say tar(1) or lsof(8). Why is there a number within parenthesis and what does it refer to exactly ?
Erick's user avatar
  • 191
2 votes
1 answer
346 views

mysql man pages options apearing with question marks

In the man pages of mysql(mysql, mysqladmin) the options appears with '?' instead of '-a, -p, etc', other commands are not affected Centos 6.4 min install
rkheik's user avatar
  • 31
-1 votes
1 answer
241 views

Download only man pages / all man pages [closed]

Frequently I'll be in a situation where I want to read the man page for some software, even though I don't have it installed. Specifically this time I want the syslogd man page, but I use Arch Linux ...
Frank's user avatar
  • 15
2 votes
3 answers
2k views

`less` not able to display special characters

I stumbled upon bad special characters in some manpages: If your terminal is a "true" auto-margin terminal (it doesn▒<80><99>t allow the last position on the screen to be updated ...
d135-1r43's user avatar
  • 401
1 vote
1 answer
118 views

how to list all function of man page 9

I did "man copy_to_user" - It shows some kernel help text. It belongs to section 9. Now I would like to know ,whether is there way to display all function belongs to this section 9.
webminal.org's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
1k views

How can I install man pages from FreeBSD server via console command?

How can I install man pages from FreeBSD server via console command?
Eonil's user avatar
  • 10.6k
2 votes
3 answers
85 views

Consulting MAN pages for specific flags

Sometimes I want to know what a specific flag means. For instance: man apache2: (...) -L Output a list of directives together with expected arguments and places where the directive ...
user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
687 views

How can I keep "man" from hyphenating items? MANWIDTH?

I've been trying to grab the output of man pages and use it in some other things. That's working OK, but linux is hyphenating the words that are at the end of a line and that's kind of irritating ...
cwd's user avatar
  • 2,783
17 votes
6 answers
9k views

How to jump to a specific heading in a man page?

I've set a filetype in vim for this. I want the help program to be man. Of course this does not work. For instance, with ssh_config's manpage, if I am on a word, say ServerAliveCountMax, I get an ...
chiggsy's user avatar
  • 1,586
3 votes
4 answers
383 views

How to grok man pages

man pages often look like a wall of text when you open them, with huge amounts of options and often not much context. But they are a great mine of information for how to use the commands. So how do ...
2 votes
1 answer
445 views

BSD route(8) MAN page bug

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=route Route is a utility used to manually manipulate the network routing tables. It normally is not needed, as a system routing table management ...
Mark Henderson's user avatar
6 votes
4 answers
941 views

Convert info pages to man pages

I was invited to re-post this question with less opinion, so if it seems familiar, that's why. How can I convert info pages into man pages? I used to have a shell one liner that flattened an entire ...
mbac32768's user avatar
  • 858
0 votes
1 answer
34 views

Strange content when extracting zipped manpage sources

For a little project at university if have to extract the zipped manpage sources, "nroff" them and parse the "nroffed" manpage for options, option arguments etc.. My script works just fine, except for ...
Trollhorn's user avatar
  • 203
1 vote
2 answers
189 views

How to get a man page for manually compiled software?

I'm using Mac OS X and I manually compiled llvm and clang because they were not available from MacPorts (a package manager). I presume clang has some kind of man page. How do I install and/or ...
xyz's user avatar
  • 501
2 votes
2 answers
561 views

MANPATH in man.conf

I've installed mac-ports which puts everything under /opt/local. The corresponding man pages are in /opt/local/man. I added the following line to /private/etc/man.conf representing the man search path ...
Ben Lever's user avatar
  • 135