Often, a man page is referenced via suffixing it with the section enclosed in parentheses, e.g.:

read(2)

This style has two main advantages:

• it is immediately clear that you reference a man page - i.e. you can write somthing like 'cf. read(3)' instead of 'cf. the section 3 man page of read'
• if multiple section contain man pages with the same name, specifying the section is more precise

Man pages are organized in sections, e.g. section 1 includes all user command man pages, section 2 all man pages for the system calls, section for library functions etc.

On the command line, if you don't explicitly specify the section you get the first matching man page, in the default section traversal order, e.g.:

$ man read

displays BASH_BUILTINS(1) on Fedora. Where

$ man 2 read

displays the man page for the read() system call.

Note that the positional specification of the section is not portable - e.g. on Solaris you would specify it like this:

$ man -s 2 read

Usually, man man also lists some of the available sections. But not necessarily all. For listing all available sections one may list the subdirectories of all directories listed in the default man path or the environment variable $MANPATH. For example on a Fedora 23 system with some development packages installs /usr/share/man has following subdirectories:

cs  es  id  man0p  man2   man3x  man5x  man7x  man9x  pt_BR  sk  zh_CN
da  fr  it  man1   man2x  man4   man6   man8   mann   pt_PT  sv  zh_TW
de  hr  ja  man1p  man3   man4x  man6x  man8x  pl     ro     tr
en  hu  ko  man1x  man3p  man5   man7   man9   pt     ru     zh

The directories with the man prefix represent each section - while the other ones contain translated sections. Thus, to get a list of non-empty sections one could issue a command like this:

$ find /usr/share/man -type f  | sed 's@^.*/man\(..*\)/.*$@\1@' \
    | sort -u | column
0p  1p  3   4   6   8
1   2   3p  5   7

(the sections ending with p are Posix man pages)

To view a man page in another language (if available) one can set a language related environment variable, e.g.:

$ LC_MESSAGES=de_DE man read

Also, each section should have an introduction man page named intro, e.g. viewable via:

$ man 2 intro

Often, a man page is referenced via suffixing it with the section enclosed in parentheses, e.g.:

read(2)

This style has two main advantages:

• it is immediately clear that you reference a man page - i.e. you can write something like 'cf. read(3)' instead of 'cf. the section 3 man page of read'
• if multiple sections contain man pages with the same name, specifying the section is more precise

Man pages are organized in sections, e.g. Section 1 includes all user command man pages, Section 2 all man pages for the system calls, Section 3 is for library functions etc.

On the command line, if you don't explicitly specify the section you get the first matching man page, in the default section traversal order, e.g.:

$ man read

displays BASH_BUILTINS(1) on Fedora. Where

$ man 2 read

displays the man page for the read() system call.

Note that the positional specification of the section is not portable - e.g. on Solaris you would specify it like this:

$ man -s 2 read

Usually, man man also lists some of the available sections. But not necessarily all. For listing all available sections one may list the subdirectories of all directories listed in the default man path or the environment variable $MANPATH. For example on a Fedora 23 system with some development packages installed /usr/share/man has following subdirectories:

cs  es  id  man0p  man2   man3x  man5x  man7x  man9x  pt_BR  sk  zh_CN
da  fr  it  man1   man2x  man4   man6   man8   mann   pt_PT  sv  zh_TW
de  hr  ja  man1p  man3   man4x  man6x  man8x  pl     ro     tr
en  hu  ko  man1x  man3p  man5   man7   man9   pt     ru     zh

The directories with the man prefix represent each section - while the other ones contain translated sections. Thus, to get a list of non-empty sections one could issue a command like this:

$ find /usr/share/man -type f  | sed 's@^.*/man\(..*\)/.*$@\1@' \
    | sort -u | column
0p  1p  3   4   6   8
1   2   3p  5   7

(the sections ending with p are POSIX man pages)

To view a man page in another language (if available) one can set a language related environment variable, e.g.:

$ LC_MESSAGES=de_DE man read

Also, each section should have an introduction man page named intro, e.g. viewable via:

$ man 2 intro