Man Pages Search – How to Perform Case Insensitive Search

By using the command man man we can see that we have two options.

   -k     Equivalent to apropos.

   -K     Search  for  the  specified  string in *all* man pages. Warning:
          this is probably very slow!  It  helps  to  specify  a  section.
          (Just  to  give  a  rough idea, on my machine this takes about a
          minute per 500 man pages.)

This is on a RHEL 5 system

For quickly getting help on a Bash builtin, use help:

help read

is what you want.

For man-page-like formatting, use

help -m read

or, even better,

help -m read | less

If you still insist on looking for it in the man page, I find what quickly gets me to a command's explanation is

/^\s*read [[]

This works because when a command is first explained, its name is indented slightly from the start of the line. In the particular case of read, this takes a little browsing before you get to the actual read documentation because (for obvious reasons) the word "read" is repeated a lot throughout the man page. The [[] means to match a [ which usually precedes optional parameters. (I usually leave out /^\s* and simply do /<built-in command> [[])

Another alternative

If you don't mind the format change, you can convert your man page to a DVI or PDF file:

man -T dvi bash >bash.dvi

or

man -T ps bash | ps2pdf - bash.pdf # Requires the Ghostscript suite for ps2pdf

Of course, given a DVI or PDF document, you can then do a text search easily.