So, for example, when I type man ls
I see LS(1)
. But if I type man apachectl
I see APACHECTL(8)
and if I type man cd
I end up with cd(n)
.
I'm wondering what the significance of the numbers in the parentheses are, if they have any.
man
So, for example, when I type man ls
I see LS(1)
. But if I type man apachectl
I see APACHECTL(8)
and if I type man cd
I end up with cd(n)
.
I'm wondering what the significance of the numbers in the parentheses are, if they have any.
Best Answer
The number corresponds to what section of the manual that page is from; 1 is user commands, while 8 is sysadmin stuff. The man page for man itself (
man man
) explains it and lists the standard ones:There are certain terms that have different pages in different sections (e.g.
printf
as a command appears in section 1, as astdlib
function appears in section 3); in cases like that you can pass the section number toman
before the page name to choose which one you want, or useman -a
to show every matching page in a row:You can tell what sections a term falls in with
man -k
(equivalent to theapropos
command). It will do substring matches too (e.g. it will showsprintf
if you runman -k printf
), so you need to use^term
to limit it:Note that the section can sometimes include a subsection (e.g., the
p
in1p
and3p
above). Thep
subsection is for POSIX specifications; thex
subsection is for X Window System documentation.