a

man page sections

• man pages are split up into 8 sections man 2 read means “get me the man page for read from section 2”.
• There’s both a program called “read” and a system call called “read”, so man 1 read gives you a different man page from man 2 read.
• If you dont’ specify a section, man will look through all the sections and show the first one it finds.

1. programs:

man grep
man ls

1. system calls:

man sendfile
man ptrace

1. C functions:

man printf
man fopen

1. devices:

man null # for /dev/null docs

1. file formats:

man sudoers # for /etc/sudoers
man proc    # files in /proc

1. games:

# not super useful
man sl

1. miscellaneous:

# explains concepts!
man 7 pipe
man 7 symlink

1. sysadmin programs:

man apt
man chroot