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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!

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!

20 questions
32
votes
5 answers

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/ckeditor/_source/plugins/uicolor/yui cannot delete…
tommarshall
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25
votes
7 answers

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 type the next command with the referee above. But…
NathaneilCapital
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16
votes
6 answers

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 error, since there is no man pager for…
chiggsy
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6
votes
2 answers

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
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6
votes
4 answers

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 info document into a single flat page, suitable…
mbac32768
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4
votes
3 answers

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 because when the text is reconstructed on a variable…
cwd
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3
votes
4 answers

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 you go about making sense of man pages? What are…
Hamish Downer
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2
votes
1 answer

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
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2
votes
3 answers

`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 without scrolling the screen) consider using a…
d135-1r43
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2
votes
2 answers

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 for port: MANPATH /opt/local/man/man1 However,…
Ben Lever
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2
votes
3 answers

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 is valid. So is there a way to use something…
user60129
2
votes
1 answer

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 daemon such as routed(8), should tend to this …
Mark Henderson
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1
vote
2 answers

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 activate it so that I can access it with man clang?
xyz
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1
vote
1 answer

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
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0
votes
2 answers

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
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