Man pages are the UNIX traditional way of distributing documentation about programs. The term "man page" itself is short for "manual page", as they correspond to the pages of the printed manual; the man pages "sections" (1 for commands, 2 for system calls, etc.) correspond to sections in the full UNIX manual. Support is still there if you want to print a man page to paper, although this is rarely done these days, and the sheer number of man pages make it just impossible to bind them all into a single book.
In the early '90s, the GNU project decided that "man" documentation system was outdated, and wrote the info command to replace it: info has basic hyperlinking features and a simpler markup language to use (compared to the "troff" system used for man pages). In addition, GNU advocates against the use of man pages at all and contends that complex software systems should have complete and comprehensive documentation rather than just a set of short man pages.
There are actually other documentation systems in use, besides man and info: GNOME and KDE have their own, HTML-based system, etc.
In the end, the form in which you get documentation depends on the internal policies of the project that provided the software in the first place -- there is no globally accepted standard.
As you may have noticed, these man pages were made by Sun for for Solaris, so Ubuntu cannot simply copy them due to copyright restrictions. The solution is for upstream (in this case, Gnome) to create the man pages themselves.
And, as already pointed out in the comments, this was requested via bug reports in both Ubuntu and Debian circa 2008. There were also many bugs filed directly upstream about this issue.
I personally filed a request to Gnome in 2011, and attached the *.1.gz man pages files from Solaris as a suggestion. They were not directly used (for technical reasons), but a few months later they created and included the man pages for all gvfs commands.
The upstream git commit including the man pages is quite recent, from June/2012 (and a few more included and then polished in August/2012), thus after Ubuntu 12.04 Precise was released.
Then, both Ubuntu and Debian must wait for a new upstream version to be released after. That only happened in 2012-07-16 in gvfs 1.13.3 and 2012-08-12 in gvfs 1.13.5.
But gvfs in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal is currently at 1.13.7, so the man pages are there in gvfs-common package
See, the system works ;-)
Best Answer
What is a man page?
A man page (short for manual page) is the traditional form of software documentation on a Unix-like OS like Ubuntu. For the vast majority of commands and programs there's a man page which lists its options and explains its usage.
How can I find and view man pages?
Offline in a terminal
Man pages are automatically installed on your system together with the commands they describe. To view and search man pages there's the command
man:displays the man page of
mvwhilesearches names and short descriptions of all installed man pages for the string
mv. POSIX Extended Regular Expressions are allowed and it's a search, so this will also find e.g.git-mvandsemver, if you want to search exactlymvuse^mv$instead.See What is the difference between `man` and `man (#)`? to read about man page sections. For more information read
man's man page. ;)How can I influence how a man page is displayed?
The default program to display man pages is
less. This so-called pager provides a helpful search function, just enter/followed by the search term, e.g.and press Enter. This will mark every finding and scroll to the first one. Press N to go to the next finding and ⇧ Shift+N to go to the previous one (see How can I search within a manpage?). For a list of commands press H, to exit
lesspress Q.Beside
lessthere are other pagers available:pg,mostandw3mjust to list three. I recommendmost: It comes with a very useful coloring of key words making a man page much easier to read and navigate, see for yourself:To view a man page in a different than your default pager use the
-Poption, e.g.:If you want to change the default pager manpages are displayed with you have two options:
change the default pager solely of
manTo make the change persistent add this command to your
~/.bashrcfile.change the default pager of your whole system
Fans can even (ab)use
vimas theMANPAGER, see this article written by muru.Man pages are displayed in the font specified in your terminal emulator settings. If you work with the terminal regularly you might want to change this font; I can only recommend Hack – a typeface designed for source code, see the screenshot above for its beauty.
Offline via GUI
A nice and easy way to display man pages with a simple GUI is the preinstalled
yelpprogram. To start a man page withyelpexecuteyelp man:PROGRAMorgnome-help man:PROGRAM, e.g.:You can also view man pages with your preferred browser, see How do I make man pages open in a web browser?, e.g. for
man mvinfirefox:Last but not least you can convert man pages to PDF and view them with your preferred PDF viewer, see: Is there a way to print info/man pages to PDF?
Online
http://manpages.ubuntu.com
You can view the man pages of programs available via the repositories of every currently supported Ubuntu version with the shorthand URL
manpg.es/PROGRAM, e.g. http://manpg.es/mv. This opensmv's man page for the latest Ubuntu release, you can choose a different release in the top bar. To search for man pages you can use e.g. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search.py?q=mv.As explained above
mancan only display man pages of software installed on the system. To view man pages from http://manpages.ubuntu.com using a terminal pager there'sdmanavailable in thebikeshedpackage.Other sources
When you read documentation from other online sources it's a good idea to keep an eye on the program version. Most programs have a
--versionoption that displays the version of the program in question, e.g.There are a lot of websites which dedicated themselves to make man pages easily available, I'm just going to present the two I like the most:
Source not already linked: https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/man/