I'd like to have an additional "man" page for grep, containing examples that I would use (but don't always remember).

I have a wide monitor and the terminal opened at fullscreen. I want man pages to be narrowed to, say, 100 characters wide, and centered on the screen, like in emacs olivetti mode: https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti . How can I do that?

Even though bash -n is a valid and widely used option, some manpages don't clearly document it in the bash options section, even though it is implemented. It's also not in the GNU Bash Reference Manual – Invoking Bash section: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Invoking-Bash.html I can understand that the Bash man page (man bash) doesn't explicitly list -n as a command-line option for Bash itself but I would expect info bash to include it since I was under the impression that info documents are much more comprehensive than linux manpages. This omission is confusing and frustrating. The only place it's mentioned is in a stackoverflow answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/171932

The *UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook* says: > man maintains a cache of formatted pages in /var/cache/man or > /usr/share/man if the appropriate directories are writable; however, > this is a security risk. Most systems preformat the man pages once at > installation time (see catman) or not at all. What is the "security risk(s)" here? There is the obvious security risk that someone can alter the man pages to trick a (novice) user into running something undesirable, as pointed out by [Ulrich Schwartz in their answer](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/652326/) , but I am looking for other ways this could be exploited. Thanks!

As per my knowledge/understanding both help and man came at the same time or have very little time difference between them. Then GNU Info came in and from what I have seen is much more verbose, much more detailed and arguably much better than what man is. Many entries even today in man are cryptic. I have often wondered why Info which is superior to man in many ways didn't succeed man at all. I still see people producing man pages than info pages. Was it due to not helpful tools for info? Something in the licenses of the two? Or some other factor which didn't get info the success it richly deserved? I did see a few questions on unix stackexchange notably https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77514/what-is-gnu-info-for and https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/19451/difference-between-help-info-and-man-command/159817 among others.

I am using Fedora and Gnome. I use GNOME Terminal and I am experiencing some odd output characters which seem to surround certain keywords on output. 1mNAME0m sync - Synchronize cached writes to persistent storage 1mSYNOPSIS0m 1msync 22m[4mOPTION24m] [4mFILE24m]... 1mDESCRIPTION0m Synchronize cached writes to persistent storage If one or more files are specified, sync only them, or their containing file systems. 1m-d22m, 1m--data0m As can be seen a 1m, 22m, 4m, 24m are used as (frustrating) highlighters. I believe it is possibly 'end of line' or some other special characters. I am using Unicode UTF-8 encoding within the terminal preferences. How can I get them removed?

If I sudo man it works fine, otherwise I'm getting

~$ man ls
fuse: mount failed: Permission denied

Cannot mount AppImage, please check your FUSE setup.
You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage 
if you run it with the --appimage-extract option. 
See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE  
for more information
open dir error: No such file or directory

for reference, setting the MANPAGER as per neovim help export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!' :Man command works fine from inside nvim.

I'm working on Solaris 10, using bash. Want to change default pager from "more" to "less" (because "less is more" :). Tried to do the following: PAGER=less PS. When I do it in csh via setenv PAGER less then it works

On Debian Bookworm, the $COLUMNS bash variable is always a little smaller than the actual terminal width. This leaves a little space on the right side whenever I run a program that runs through less, such as man, git help commit, etc. Here's a screenshot of the output of man bash, note the margin on the right side: However, $COLUMNS on my Fedora is set to the full width of the terminal emulator. How can I make the $COLUMNS variable always equal to the full width of the terminal emulator? Since there are so many programs that would go through the pager, I prefer not using a solution that sets COLUMNS= before a particular program launches. The solution should also be able to change $COLUMNS when the terminal window resizes, like what bash does by default.

After downloading the source code for Bash, I was browsing through the doc directory and came across the following files: * [bash.1](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/doc/bash.1) is a regular [troff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff) file used to build the *man page*. * [bash.0](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/doc/bash.0) is like a plain text version of the man page – only that it has the [^H backspace control character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#.5EH) liberally distributed throughout it. These control characters are not displayed in the representation provided by the Git web interface but the [actual file can be downloaded](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/plain/doc/bash.0) and examined in text editor such as Vim. Running the file command on bash.0 prints the following output: bash.0: ASCII text, with overstriking I’ve never come across this file format before and I was wondering what its purpose is and how it’s used. Searching the Web for the phrase *“ASCII text, with overstriking”* hasn’t been very enlightening.

On the machine I am working on I have English man pages under /usr/share/man/and German ones under /usr/share/man/de. The former are encoded with us-ascii, the latter ones with utf-8. Unfortunately some special characters (Umlaute) in the German man pages are not displayed properly when calling $ man some_command_with_german_manpage with my current settings. What are the correct settings in /etc/man.conf to resolve this issue? At the moment I have the following (omitting lines that I do think are not relevant): TROFF /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tps -mandoc -c JNROFF /usr/bin/groff -Tnippon -mandoc EQN /usr/bin/geqn -Tps NEQN /usr/bin/geqn -Tlatin1 JNEQN /usr/bin/geqn -Tnippon TBL /usr/bin/gtbl # COL /usr/bin/col REFER /usr/bin/refer PIC /usr/bin/pic VGRIND GRAP PAGER /usr/bin/less -isR BROWSER /usr/bin/lynx HTMLPAGER /usr/bin/lynx -dump CAT /bin/cat $ locale returns the following: LANG=de_DE.utf8 LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.utf8" LC_TIME="de_DE.utf8" LC_COLLATE="de_DE.utf8" LC_MONETARY="de_DE.utf8" LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.utf8" LC_PAPER="de_DE.utf8" LC_NAME="de_DE.utf8" LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.utf8" LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.utf8" LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.utf8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.utf8" LC_ALL=

Where can I find more information about the command(?) print since I don't receive a result when I input man print? For example, in the zsh I can do the following: $ print "Hello, world\!" Hello, world! I've seen print -P foo and print -n bar used among other flags and have no idea what they mean nor do I know where to look for further information. So we have two questions really: 1. Where does print come from and where can I find documentation for it? 2. Where does one find documentation for similar items that are not to be found in the man pages? NOTE: For clarification, I'm not trying to print a sheet of paper. I am also aware of printf, which allows for formatted output and has a man page.

Doing man -t man > man.ps will export the man page for man in postscript. How can I export it in PDF? I have gone through the manuals and learnt about the -T option but it's a bit unclear to me.

I often open man pages of a certain CLI tool only to check a particular flag, e.g. man iptables to check -t flag. Is there any tool that simplifies it? I could of course write a simple function in Bash grepping the contents of a man pages but I am looking for something that uses the structure of man pages to find exactly what I want (i.e. description of a certain flag).

I like the man command's status prompt to be customized. The default as picked from its own man page is like this, Manual page name(sec) line x But, having it show me the percentage of contents read is my preference. So I set the environment variable that controls the prompt, MANLESS as, export MANLESS='?pt%pt \%: ' The prompt is empty. I put -P in the front as, export MANLESS='-P?pt%pt \%: ' No progress, now the prompt only contains -P. So, I directly set it for every invocation using the -r option, man -r '?pt%pt \%: ' less That too didn't help. But, this same prompt when set to LESS env. variable as export LESS="-P?pt%pt \%" Every direct invocation of less is showing the desired prompt as x %. It is only when less pager is called through man, it does not work.

We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message

gimme gimme gimme

in stderr, which wasn't expected. Why are we getting this output?

I've noticed that man pages and other documents formatted by Unix utilities often use double backticks followed by double single quotes '' to wrap quoted phrases instead of the double quote character ". Single quotes are similarly replaced. Why is this? Here are a couple examples, from the man page for grep: To find all occurrences of the pattern `.Pp' at the beginning of a line: $ grep '^\.Pp' myfile The apostrophes ensure the entire expression is evaluated by grep instead of by the user's shell. The caret `^' matches the null string at the beginning of a line, and the \' escapes the .', which would otherwise match any character. The grep utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (``POSIX.1'') specification.

For a man page written in POD (perlpod) I had the effect that the SYNOPSIS was left-adjusted on the text terminal, but the PostScript output (read: troff) adjusted the text to both borders. So I tried to embed formatting commands in the POD source. However, even when specifying .nh some words like "[--[no-]check-grace-logins]" were hyphenated at a minus. That made me wonder whether the man -l command disobeys the .nh command. The manual page for roff(7) says: > .nh No hyphenation. Here is the relevant part of the roff man page: ~~~lang-roff .\" ======================================================================== .\" .IX Title "LDAP-USER-CHECK 8" .TH LDAP-USER-CHECK 8 "2024-08-14" "0.0.0.0.20n" "System Administration" .\" For nroff, turn off justification. Always turn off hyphenation; it makes .\" way too many mistakes in technical documents. .if n .ad l .nh .SH "NAME" ldap\-user\-check \- check LDAP account status .SH "SYNOPSIS" .IX Header "SYNOPSIS" .\" BEGIN roff .\" save adjustment, then left-adjust .ds _A \n[.j] .ad l .\" save hyphenation, then disable .ds _H \n[.hy] .nh .\" END roff \&\fBldap-user-check\fR [\fB\-\-account\-context=\fR\fIcontext\fR] [\fB\-\-account\-filter=\fR\fIfilter\fR] [\fB\-\-add\-notification\-bcc\-address=\fR\fIemail-spec\fR]... [\fB\-\-add\-notification\-cc\-address=\fR\fIemail-spec\fR]... [\fB\-\-default\-default\-ppolicy=\fR\fIdn\fR] [\fB\-\-default\-language=\fR\fIlang\fR] [\fB\-\-default\-notification\-email\-address=\fR\fIemail-spec\fR]... [\fB\-\-ca\-certs\-path=\fR\fIpath\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-auth-failure\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-grace-logins\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-inconsistent-accounts\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-locked-accounts\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-password-policy\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-pp-override\fR] [\fB\-\-\fR[\fBno\-\fR]\fBcheck-shadow-password\fR] [\fB\-\-credentials\-file\-name=\fR\fIfilename\fR] [\fB\-\-instance\-string=\fR\fIinstance\fR] [\fB\-\-ldap\-size\-limit=\fR\fInumber\fR] \&\fB\-\-ldap\-suffix=\fR\fIsuffix\fR [\fB\-\-ldap\-time\-limit=\fR\fInumber\fR] \&\fB\-\-ldap\-uri=\fR\fI\s-1URI\s0\fR \&\fB\-\-notification\-template=\fR\fIfilename\fR [\fB\-\-override\-default\-ppolicy=\fR\fIdn\fR] [\fB\-\-override\-expiration\-warning\-time=\fR\fInumber\fR] [\fB\-\-override\-from\-email\-address=\fR\fIemail-spec\fR] [\fB\-\-override\-notification\-email\-address=\fR\fIemail-spec\fR]... [\fB\-\-ppolicy\-context=\fR\fIcontext\fR] [\fB\-\-set\-notification\-reply\-to\-address=\fR\fIemail-spec\fR] [\fB\-\-verbosity=\fR\fIlevel\fR] [\fB\-\-wrap\-template=\fR\fIlen\fR] .\" BEGIN roff .\" restore saved hyphenation and adjustment .hy \*(_H .ad \*(_A .\" END roff .SH "DESCRIPTION" .IX Header "DESCRIPTION" ~~~ And here is what I see on a 80-character wide terminal: WHen converting that manual page using groff -man -Tps the .nh seems to be ignored as well: Programs being used are perl 5.18.2, groff-1.22, both from SLES12 SP5.

Today I have read two answers about which regular expressions are supported by less: - Kusalananda mentioned re_format(7) and referenced its manpage as man 7 re_format.

RE_FORMAT(7)           Miscellaneous Information Manual           RE_FORMAT(7)

  NAME
       re_format – POSIX 1003.2 regular expressions

  DESCRIPTION
       Regular expressions (“REs”), as defined in IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”),

- ilkkachu mentioned regex(7) and referenced its manpage by providing a link to a web page instead.

regex(7)            Miscellaneous Information Manual            regex(7)

  NAME
       regex - POSIX.2 regular expressions

  DESCRIPTION
       Regular expressions ("RE"s), as defined in POSIX.2,

I try to figure out how to open the regex(7) manpage from the shell instead of reading it on the web. man regex7, man regex(7), man 7 regex, man7 regex just don't work, and man regex leads to the regex(3) manpage instead.

I see these [pretty colors in manpages](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/119/colors-in-man-pages) viewed with less when setting a bunch of these variables. What do they mean, where is the documentation? Is this interpreted by less or termcap? ### screenshot