Unix Programmer Manual
Section 8 intro manpage, displaying in a text console In the first two years of the, no documentation existed. The was first published on November 3, 1971. The first actual man pages were written by and at the insistence of their manager in 1971.
Aside from the man pages, the Programmer's Manual also accumulated a set of short papers, some of them (e.g. For general Unix usage, the programming language, and tools such as ), and others more detailed descriptions of operating system features. The printed version of the manual initially fit into a single binder, but as of and the of, it was split into two volumes with the printed man pages forming Volume 1. Later versions of the documentation imitated the first man pages' terseness. Ritchie added a 'How to get started' section to the introduction, and provided the 'Purple Card' pocket reference for the and Editions.
Versions of the software were named after the revision of the manual; the seventh edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual, for example, came with the 7th Edition or Version 7 of Unix. For the Edition the man pages were formatted using the typesetting package and its set of -man macros (which were completely revised between the Sixth and Seventh Editions of the Manual, but have since not drastically changed). At the time, the availability of online documentation through the manual page system was regarded as a great advance. To this day, virtually every Unix command line application comes with a man page, and many Unix users perceive a program's lack of man pages as a sign of low quality; indeed, some projects, such as, go out of their way to write man pages for programs lacking one.
The modern descendants of also distribute man pages as one of the primary forms of system documentation (having replaced the old -man macros with the newer -mdoc). Few alternatives to man have enjoyed much popularity, with the possible exception of ' ' system, an early and simple system. In addition, some Unix applications (particularly those built using the and development environments) now provide end-user documentation in and include embedded HTML viewers such as yelp for reading the help within the application. Man pages are usually written in English, but translations into other languages may be available on the system.
Part of the man(1) manual page, typeset into format. The default format of the man pages is, with either the man (appearance oriented) or (semantic oriented). This makes it possible to typeset a man page into, and various other formats for viewing or printing.
Most systems have a package for the man2html command, which enables users to browse their man pages using an html browser (textproc/man2html on or man on some distribution). In 2010, deprecated for formatting manpages in favour of, a specialised compiler/formatter for manpages with native support for output in, and the terminal. In February 2013, the community saw a new open source service launched, which unified and shortened access to the man.cgi scripts of the major modern BSD projects through a unique -based deterministic service for the.BSD man pages. There was a hidden in the man-db version of the man command that would cause the command to return 'gimme gimme gimme' when run at 00:30 (a reference to the song. It was introduced in 2011 but first restricted and then removed in 2017 after finally being found. Command usage To read a manual page for a Unix command, a user can type.
Man Pages are traditionally referred to using the notation 'name(section)': for example,. The section refers to different ways the topic might be referenced - for example, as a system call, or a shell (command line) command or package, or a package's configuration file, or as a coding construct / header. The same page name may appear in more than one section of the manual, such as when the names of, user, or coincide. Examples are and,. The syntax for accessing the non-default manual section varies between different man implementations. On Solaris and illumos, for example, the syntax for reading is.
This section does not any. Unsourced material may be challenged.
(PDF) (Technical report). ^ Darwin, Ian; Collyer, Geoffrey. Retrieved 22 December 2012. Originally published in Microsystems 5(11), November 1984. Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983).
Retrieved 30 January 2015. Pali, Gabor, ed. (12 May 2013). Retrieved 25 December 2014.
Murenin, Constantine A. (19 February 2013). Freebsd-doc@freebsd.org (Mailing list). Retrieved 25 December 2014. Murenin, Constantine A. (23 February 2013). Retrieved 25 December 2014.
Retrieved 22 November 2017. Retrieved 22 November 2017. Retrieved 25 September 2018. Retrieved 22 November 2017. External links. for a primary-source history of UNIX manpages.
Unix Programmer's Manual - Introduction UNIX PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL K. Etabs manual. Ritchie November 3, 1971 INTRODUCTION This manual gives complete descriptions of all the publicly available features of UNIX. It provides neither a general overview (see The UNIX Time-sharing System for that) nor details of the implementation of the system (which remain to be disclosed). Within the area it surveys, this manual attempts to be as complete and timely as possible. A conscious decision was made to describe each program in exactly the state it was in at the time its manual section was prepared. In particular, the desire to describe something as it should be, not as it is, was resisted. Inevitably, this means that many sections will soon be out of date.
Linux Programmer's Manual
(The rate of change of the system is so great that a dismayingly large number of early sections had to be modified while the rest were being written. The unbounded effort required to stay up-to-date is best indicated by the fact that several of the programs described were written specifically to aid in preparation of this manual.) This manual is divided into seven sections:.
I. Commands. II. System calls. III. Subroutines. IV.
Special files. V. File formats. VI. User-maintained programs.
Unix Programmer's Manual Volume 2
VII. Miscellaneous Commands are programs intended to be invoked directly by the user, in contradistinction to subroutines, which are intended to be called by the user's programs.
Commands generally reside in directory bin (for binary programs). This directory is searched automatically by the command line interpreter. Some programs classified as commands are located elsewhere; this fact is indicated in the appropriate sections. System calls are entries into the UNIX supervisor. In assembly language, they are coded with the use of the opcode sys, a synonym for the trap instruction. The special files section discusses the characteristics of each system file which actually refers to an I/O device. The file formats section documents the structure of particular kinds of files; for example, the form of the output of the loader and assembler is given.
Excluded are files used by only one command, for example the assembler's intermediate files. User-maintained programs are not considered part of the UNIX system, and the principal reason for listing them is to indicate their existence without necessarily giving a complete description. The author should be consulted for more information. The miscellaneous section gathers odds and ends. Each section consists of a number of independent entries of a page or so each.
The name of the entry is in the upper right corner of its pages, its preparation date in the upper left. Entries within each section are alphabetized. It was thought better to avoid page numbers, since it is hoped that the manual will be updated frequently. All entries have a common format. The name section repeats the entry name and gives a very short description of its purpose.
The synopsis summarizes the use of the program being described. A few conventions are used, particularly in the Commands section. Underlined words are considered literals, and are typed just as they appear. Square brackets ( ) around an argument indicate that the argument is optional. When an argument is given as name, it always refers to a file name. Are used to show that the previous argument-prototype may be repeated.
A final convention is used by the commands themselves. An argument beginning with a minus sign - is often taken to mean some sort of flag argument even if it appears in a position where a file name could appear. Therefore, it is unwise to have files whose names begin with. The description section discusses in detail the subject at hand. The files section gives the names of files which are built into the program. A see also section gives pointers to related information. A diagnostics section discusses the diagnostics that may be produced.
This section tends to be as terse as the diagnostics themselves. The Bugs section gives known bugs and sometimes deficiencies. Occasionally also the suggested fix is described.
The Owner section gives the name of the person or persons to be consulted in case of difficulty. The rule has been that the last one to modify something owns it, so the owner is not necessarily the author.
The owner's initials stand for: ken K. Thompson dmr D.
Ritchie jfo J. Ossanna rhm R. Morris These three-character names also happen to be UNIX user ID's, so messages may be transmitted by the mail command or, if the addressee is logged in, by write. At the beginning of this document is a table of contents, organized by section and alphabetically within each section. There is also a permuted index derived from the table of contents. Within each index entry, the title of the writeup to which it refers is followed by the appropriate section number in parentheses.
This fact is important because there is considerable name duplication among the sections, arising principally from commands which exist only to exercise a particular system call. This manual was prepared using the UNIX text editor ed and the formatting program roff.