Linux – Obtain Complete Set of Man Pages from man7.org

debianlinuxman

I sometimes find that man7.org has available man pages not found on locally on my Linux distribution.

An example is veth(4) that provides information on veth network devices.

A quick inspection using apropos returns no results, although the ip (iproute2) is installed:

parallels@debian-gnu-linux-vm:~$ apropos veth
veth: nothing appropriate.

How can I obtain these very useful man pages on network devices (e.g. veth(4))?

More generally, how can I obtain the complete man7.org database?

parallels@debian-gnu-linux-vm:~$ cat /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="9"
VERSION="9 (stretch)"
VERSION_CODENAME=stretch
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

Best Answer

I’m not aware of a single source for all the man pages on man7.org, but there is a list of all the source projects used to build the web site; if you install all the corresponding packages, you’ll have all the relevant man pages.

In particular, you should install the manpages and manpages-dev packages; these contain the man pages maintained as part of the man-pages project.

Note that the web site reflects the current state (or latest release) of each source project; this will be newer in many cases than the versions available in Debian 9 or 10. In particular, you won’t find the veth man page in Debian 9: it was added in version 4.14 of the man-pages project, but Debian 9 has version 4.10. Version 4.16 is available in Stretch backports.

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