Linux Man Pages – How to Follow Hypertext Links

hypertextman

Is there a way to follow the links mentioned in a man page? For example, here's the man page for ps; how do I access the link marked in red?

Screenshot of the ps man page

Best Answer

Man pages date back to Unix First Edition. While hypertext had been invented, it was still in infancy; the web was two decades away, and the manual was an actual printed book, often with one command per page if they fit (that's why they were called pages).

The format used for manual pages has evolved somewhat since then, but most pages aren't really designed for hypertext, and the default man program doesn't support it (it's just a plain text viewer, with hacks to support some basic formatting). There are however man page viewing programs that reconstruct some hyperlinks, mainly links to other man pages, which are traditionally written in the form man(1) where man is the name of the man page and 1 is the section number:

You can browse the manual pages of several operating systems, converted to HTML by man2html or similar tools, on a number of sites online, for example:

Some time after man pages had become the established documentation format on unix and some time before the web was invented, the GNU project introduced the info documentation format, more advanced than man while sticking to simple markup designed for text terminals. The major innovation of info compared to man was to have multi-page documentation with hyperlinks to other pages. Info is still the prefered documentation format for GNU projects, though most Info pages are generated from a Texinfo source (or sometimes other formats) that can also generate HTML. When info documentation for a program exists, it's often the main manual, while the man pages only contain basic information about command line arguments.

Related Question