Home / Definitions / Man Page

Man Page

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:48 am

Short for manual page, a page of on-line documentation in UNIX systems. Every UNIX command, utility, and library function has an associated man page that you can view by entering the command:

> man

For example, to find out about the man command itself, you would enter:

> man man

If you don’t know the name of the command, but only the general topic, you can use the apropos command,

> apropos

which lists all the man pages related to the specified topic.

Man pages are stored as nroff files.