NAME¶
man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
SYNOPSIS¶
man [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
[
--warnings[=
warnings]] [
-R encoding] [
-L
locale] [
-m system[,...]] [
-M path]
[
-S list] [
-e extension] [
-i|
-I]
[
--regex|
--wildcard] [
--names-only] [
-a]
[
-u] [
--no-subpages] [
-P pager] [
-r
prompt] [
-7] [
-E encoding]
[
--no-hyphenation] [
--no-justification] [
-p
string] [
-t] [
-T[
device]]
[
-H[
browser]] [
-X[
dpi]] [
-Z]
[[
section]
page ...] ...
man -k [
apropos options]
regexp ...
man -K [
-w|
-W] [
-S list]
[
-i|
-I] [
--regex] [
section]
term ...
man -f [
whatis options]
page ...
man -l [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
[
--warnings[=
warnings]] [
-R encoding] [
-L
locale] [
-P pager] [
-r prompt] [
-7]
[
-E encoding] [
-p string] [
-t]
[
-T[
device]] [
-H[
browser]] [
-X[
dpi]]
[
-Z]
file ...
man -w|
-W [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
page ...
man -c [
-C file] [
-d] [
-D]
page
...
man [
-?V]
DESCRIPTION¶
man is the system's manual pager. Each
page argument given to
man is normally the name of a program, utility or function. The
manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and
displayed. A
section, if provided, will direct
man to look only
in that
section of the manual. The default action is to search in all
of the available
sections following a pre-defined order ("1 n l 8
3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7" by default, unless overridden by the
SECTION directive in
/etc/manpath.config), and to show only the
first
page found, even if
page exists in several
sections.
The table below shows the
section numbers of the manual followed by the
types of pages they contain.
1 |
Executable programs or shell commands |
2 |
System calls (functions provided by the kernel) |
3 |
Library calls (functions within program libraries) |
4 |
Special files (usually found in /dev) |
5 |
File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd |
6 |
Games |
7 |
Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g.
man(7), groff(7) |
8 |
System administration commands (usually only for root) |
9 |
Kernel routines [Non standard] |
A manual
page consists of several sections.
Conventional section names include
NAME,
SYNOPSIS,
CONFIGURATION,
DESCRIPTION,
OPTIONS,
EXIT STATUS,
RETURN VALUE,
ERRORS,
ENVIRONMENT,
FILES,
VERSIONS,
CONFORMING TO,
NOTES,
BUGS,
EXAMPLE,
AUTHORS, and
SEE ALSO.
The following conventions apply to the
SYNOPSIS section and can be used
as a guide in other sections.
bold text |
type exactly as shown. |
italic text |
replace with appropriate argument. |
[-abc] |
any or all arguments within [ ] are optional. |
-a|-b |
options delimited by | cannot be used together. |
argument ... |
argument is repeatable. |
[expression] ... |
entire expression within [ ] is repeatable. |
Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device. For instance, man will
usually not be able to render italics when running in a terminal, and will
typically use underlined or coloured text instead.
The command or function illustration is a pattern that should match all possible
invocations. In some cases it is advisable to illustrate several exclusive
invocations as is shown in the
SYNOPSIS section of this manual page.
EXAMPLES¶
- man ls
- Display the manual page for the item (program) ls.
- man -a intro
- Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages
contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive
displays or skip any of them.
- man -t alias | lpr -Pps
- Format the manual page referenced by `alias', usually a shell
manual page, into the default troff or groff format and pipe
it to the printer named ps. The default output for groff is
usually PostScript. man --help should advise as to which processor
is bound to the -t option.
- man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz >
./foo.1x.dvi
- This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page
./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi) file. The
redirection is necessary as the -T flag causes output to be
directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a
program such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a
program such as dvips.
- man -k printf
- Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword
printf as regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to
apropos -r printf.
- man -f smail
- Lookup the manual pages referenced by smail and print out the short
descriptions of any found. Equivalent to
whatis -r smail.
OVERVIEW¶
Many options are available to
man in order to give as much flexibility as
possible to the user. Changes can be made to the search path, section order,
output processor, and other behaviours and operations detailed below.
If set, various environment variables are interrogated to determine the
operation of
man. It is possible to set the `catch all' variable
$
MANOPT to any string in command line format with the exception that
any spaces used as part of an option's argument must be escaped (preceded by a
backslash).
man will parse $
MANOPT prior to parsing its own
command line. Those options requiring an argument will be overridden by the
same options found on the command line. To reset all of the options set in
$
MANOPT,
-D can be specified as the initial command line option.
This will allow man to `forget' about the options specified in $
MANOPT
although they must still have been valid.
The manual pager utilities packaged as
man-db make extensive use of
index database caches. These caches contain information such as where
each manual page can be found on the filesystem and what its
whatis
(short one line description of the man page) contains, and allow
man to
run faster than if it had to search the filesystem each time to find the
appropriate manual page. If requested using the
-u option,
man
will ensure that the caches remain consistent, which can obviate the need to
manually run software to update traditional
whatis text databases.
If
man cannot find a
mandb initiated
index database for a
particular manual page hierarchy, it will still search for the requested
manual pages, although file globbing will be necessary to search within that
hierarchy. If
whatis or
apropos fails to find an
index it
will try to extract information from a traditional
whatis database
instead.
These utilities support compressed source nroff files having, by default, the
extensions of
.Z,
.z and
.gz. It is possible to deal with
any compression extension, but this information must be known at compile time.
Also, by default, any cat pages produced are compressed using
gzip.
Each `global' manual page hierarchy such as
/usr/share/man or
/usr/X11R6/man may have any directory as its cat page hierarchy.
Traditionally the cat pages are stored under the same hierarchy as the man
pages, but for reasons such as those specified in the
File Hierarchy
Standard (FHS), it may be better to store them elsewhere. For details on
how to do this, please read
manpath(5). For details on why to do this,
read the standard.
International support is available with this package. Native language manual
pages are accessible (if available on your system) via use of
locale
functions. To activate such support, it is necessary to set either
$
LC_MESSAGES, $
LANG or another system dependent environment
variable to your language locale, usually specified in the
POSIX 1003.1
based format:
<
language>[
_<
territory>[
.<
character-set>[
,<
version>]]]
If the desired page is available in your
locale, it will be displayed in
lieu of the standard (usually American English) page.
Support for international message catalogues is also featured in this package
and can be activated in the same way, again if available. If you find that the
manual pages and message catalogues supplied with this package are not
available in your native language and you would like to supply them, please
contact the maintainer who will be coordinating such activity.
For information regarding other features and extensions available with this
manual pager, please read the documents supplied with the package.
DEFAULTS¶
man will search for the desired manual pages within the
index
database caches. If the
-u option is given, a cache consistency check
is performed to ensure the databases accurately reflect the filesystem. If
this option is always given, it is not generally necessary to run
mandb
after the caches are initially created, unless a cache becomes corrupt.
However, the cache consistency check can be slow on systems with many manual
pages installed, so it is not performed by default, and system administrators
may wish to run
mandb every week or so to keep the database caches
fresh. To forestall problems caused by outdated caches,
man will fall
back to file globbing if a cache lookup fails, just as it would if no cache
was present.
Once a manual page has been located, a check is performed to find out if a
relative preformatted `cat' file already exists and is newer than the nroff
file. If it does and is, this preformatted file is (usually) decompressed and
then displayed, via use of a pager. The pager can be specified in a number of
ways, or else will fall back to a default is used (see option
-P for
details). If no cat is found or is older than the nroff file, the nroff is
filtered through various programs and is shown immediately.
If a cat file can be produced (a relative cat directory exists and has
appropriate permissions),
man will compress and store the cat file in
the background.
The filters are deciphered by a number of means. Firstly, the command line
option
-p or the environment variable $
MANROFFSEQ is
interrogated. If
-p was not used and the environment variable was not
set, the initial line of the nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string.
To contain a valid preprocessor string, the first line must resemble
'\" <
string>
where
string can be any combination of letters described by option
-p below.
If none of the above methods provide any filter information, a default set is
used.
A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary formatter
(
nroff or [
tg]
roff with
-t) and executed.
Alternatively, if an executable program
mandb_nfmt (or
mandb_tfmt with
-t) exists in the man tree root, it is executed
instead. It gets passed the manual source file, the preprocessor string, and
optionally the device specified with
-T or
-E as arguments.
OPTIONS¶
Non argument options that are duplicated either on the command line, in
$
MANOPT, or both, are not harmful. For options that require an
argument, each duplication will override the previous argument value.
General options¶
- -C file, --config-file=file
- Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
~/.manpath.
- -d, --debug
- Print debugging information.
- -D, --default
- This option is normally issued as the very first option and resets
man's behaviour to its default. Its use is to reset those options
that may have been set in $MANOPT. Any options that follow
-D will have their usual effect.
- --warnings[=warnings]
- Enable warnings from groff. This may be used to perform sanity
checks on the source text of manual pages. warnings is a
comma-separated list of warning names; if it is not supplied, the default
is "mac". See the “Warnings” node in info
groff for a list of available warning names.
Main modes of operation¶
- -f, --whatis
- Equivalent to whatis. Display a short description from the manual
page, if available. See whatis(1) for details.
- -k, --apropos
- Equivalent to apropos. Search the short manual page descriptions
for keywords and display any matches. See apropos(1) for
details.
- -K, --global-apropos
- Search for text in all manual pages. This is a brute-force search, and is
likely to take some time; if you can, you should specify a section to
reduce the number of pages that need to be searched. Search terms may be
simple strings (the default), or regular expressions if the --regex
option is used.
- -l, --local-file
- Activate `local' mode. Format and display local manual files instead of
searching through the system's manual collection. Each manual page
argument will be interpreted as an nroff source file in the correct
format. No cat file is produced. If '-' is listed as one of the arguments,
input will be taken from stdin. When this option is not used, and man
fails to find the page required, before displaying the error message, it
attempts to act as if this option was supplied, using the name as a
filename and looking for an exact match.
- -w, --where, --path, --location
- Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the location(s) of
the source nroff files that would be formatted.
- -W, --where-cat, --location-cat
- Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the location(s) of
the cat files that would be displayed. If -w and -W are both specified,
print both separated by a space.
- -c, --catman
- This option is not for general use and should only be used by the
catman program.
- -R encoding, --recode=encoding
- Instead of formatting the manual page in the usual way, output its source
converted to the specified encoding. If you already know the
encoding of the source file, you can also use manconv(1) directly.
However, this option allows you to convert several manual pages to a
single encoding without having to explicitly state the encoding of each,
provided that they were already installed in a structure similar to a
manual page hierarchy.
Finding manual pages¶
- -L locale, --locale=locale
- man will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C
function setlocale(3) which interrogates various environment
variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To
temporarily override the determined value, use this option to supply a
locale string directly to man. Note that it will not take
effect until the search for pages actually begins. Output such as the help
message will always be displayed in the initially determined locale.
-m system[,...],
--systems=system[,...]
If this system has access to other operating system's
manual pages, they can be accessed using this option. To search for a manual
page from NewOS's manual page collection, use the option
-m
NewOS.
The
system specified can be a combination of comma delimited operating
system names. To include a search of the native operating system's manual
pages, include the system name
man in the argument string. This option
will override the $
SYSTEM environment variable.
- -M path, --manpath=path
- Specify an alternate manpath to use. By default, man uses
manpath derived code to determine the path to search. This option
overrides the $MANPATH environment variable and causes option
-m to be ignored.
A path specified as a manpath must be the root of a manual page hierarchy
structured into sections as described in the man-db manual (under
"The manual page system"). To view manual pages outside such
hierarchies, see the -l option.
- -S list, -s list, --sections=list
- List is a colon- or comma-separated list of `order specific' manual
sections to search. This option overrides the $MANSECT environment
variable. (The -s spelling is for compatibility with System
V.)
- -e sub-extension, --extension=sub-extension
- Some systems incorporate large packages of manual pages, such as those
that accompany the Tcl package, into the main manual page
hierarchy. To get around the problem of having two manual pages with the
same name such as exit(3), the Tcl pages were usually all
assigned to section l. As this is unfortunate, it is now possible
to put the pages in the correct section, and to assign a specific
`extension' to them, in this case, exit(3tcl). Under normal
operation, man will display exit(3) in preference to
exit(3tcl). To negotiate this situation and to avoid having to know
which section the page you require resides in, it is now possible to give
man a sub-extension string indicating which package the page
must belong to. Using the above example, supplying the option
-e tcl to man will restrict the search to pages
having an extension of *tcl.
- -i, --ignore-case
- Ignore case when searching for manual pages. This is the default.
- -I, --match-case
- Search for manual pages case-sensitively.
- --regex
- Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions
matching each page argument as a regular expression, as with
apropos(1). Since there is usually no reasonable way to pick a
"best" page when searching for a regular expression, this option
implies -a.
- --wildcard
- Show all pages with any part of either their names or their descriptions
matching each page argument using shell-style wildcards, as with
apropos(1) --wildcard. The page argument must match
the entire name or description, or match on word boundaries in the
description. Since there is usually no reasonable way to pick a
"best" page when searching for a wildcard, this option implies
-a.
- --names-only
- If the --regex or --wildcard option is used, match only page
names, not page descriptions, as with whatis(1). Otherwise, no
effect.
- -a, --all
- By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual
page it finds. Using this option forces man to display all the
manual pages with names that match the search criteria.
- -u, --update
- This option causes man to perform an `inode level' consistency
check on its database caches to ensure that they are an accurate
representation of the filesystem. It will only have a useful effect if
man is installed with the setuid bit set.
- --no-subpages
- By default, man will try to interpret pairs of manual page names
given on the command line as equivalent to a single manual page name
containing a hyphen or an underscore. This supports the common pattern of
programs that implement a number of subcommands, allowing them to provide
manual pages for each that can be accessed using similar syntax as would
be used to invoke the subcommands themselves. For example:
$ man -aw git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git-diff.1.gz
To disable this behaviour, use the --no-subpages option.
$ man -aw --no-subpages git diff
/usr/share/man/man1/git.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/Git.3pm.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/diff.1.gz
- -P pager, --pager=pager
- Specify which output pager to use. By default, man uses pager
-s. This option overrides the $MANPAGER environment variable,
which in turn overrides the $PAGER environment variable. It is not
used in conjunction with -f or -k.
The value may be a simple command name or a command with arguments, and may
use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes). It may
not use pipes to connect multiple commands; if you need that, use a
wrapper script, which may take the file to display either as an argument
or on standard input.
- -r prompt, --prompt=prompt
- If a recent version of less is used as the pager, man will
attempt to set its prompt and some sensible options. The default prompt
looks like
Manual
page name(sec) line x
where name denotes the manual page name, sec denotes the
section it was found under and x the current line number. This is
achieved by using the $LESS environment variable.
Supplying -r with a string will override this default. The string may
contain the text $MAN_PN which will be expanded to the name of the
current manual page and its section name surrounded by `(' and `)'. The
string used to produce the default could be expressed as
\ Manual\ page\ \$MAN_PN\ ?ltline\ %lt?L/%L.:
byte\ %bB?s/%s..?\ (END):?pB\ %pB\\%..
(press h for help or q to quit)
It is broken into three lines here for the sake of readability only. For its
meaning see the less(1) manual page. The prompt string is first
evaluated by the shell. All double quotes, back-quotes and backslashes in
the prompt must be escaped by a preceding backslash. The prompt string may
end in an escaped $ which may be followed by further options for less. By
default man sets the -ix8 options.
The $MANLESS environment variable described below may be used to set
a default prompt string if none is supplied on the command line.
- -7, --ascii
- When viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7 bit terminal or
terminal emulator, some characters may not display correctly when using
the latin1(7) device description with GNU nroff. This
option allows pure ascii manual pages to be displayed in
ascii with the latin1 device. It will not translate any
latin1 text. The following table shows the translations performed:
some parts of it may only be displayed properly when using GNU
nroff's latin1(7) device.
Description |
Octal |
latin1 |
ascii |
|
continuation hyphen |
255 |
‐ |
- |
bullet (middle dot) |
267 |
• |
o |
acute accent |
264 |
´ |
' |
multiplication sign |
327 |
× |
x |
If the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal may be set up
for latin1 characters and this option is not necessary. If the
latin1 and ascii columns are identical, you are reading this
page using this option or man did not format this page using the
latin1 device description. If the latin1 column is missing
or corrupt, you may need to view manual pages with this option.
This option is ignored when using options -t, -H, -T,
or -Z and may be useless for nroff other than
GNU's.
- -E encoding, --encoding=encoding
- Generate output for a character encoding other than the default. For
backward compatibility, encoding may be an nroff device such
as ascii, latin1, or utf8 as well as a true character
encoding such as UTF-8.
- --no-hyphenation, --nh
- Normally, nroff will automatically hyphenate text at line breaks
even in words that do not contain hyphens, if it is necessary to do so to
lay out words on a line without excessive spacing. This option disables
automatic hyphenation, so words will only be hyphenated if they already
contain hyphens.
If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent nroff
from hyphenating a word at an inappropriate point, do not use this option,
but consult the nroff documentation instead; for instance, you can
put "\%" inside a word to indicate that it may be hyphenated at
that point, or put "\%" at the start of a word to prevent it
from being hyphenated.
- --no-justification, --nj
- Normally, nroff will automatically justify text to both margins.
This option disables full justification, leaving justified only to the
left margin, sometimes called "ragged-right" text.
If you are writing a manual page and simply want to prevent nroff
from justifying certain paragraphs, do not use this option, but consult
the nroff documentation instead; for instance, you can use the
".na", ".nf", ".fi", and ".ad"
requests to temporarily disable adjusting and filling.
- -p string, --preprocessor=string
- Specify the sequence of preprocessors to run before nroff or
troff/groff. Not all installations will have a full set of
preprocessors. Some of the preprocessors and the letters used to designate
them are: eqn (e), grap (g), pic
(p), tbl (t), vgrind (v), refer
(r). This option overrides the $MANROFFSEQ environment
variable. zsoelim is always run as the very first
preprocessor.
- -t, --troff
- Use groff -mandoc to format the manual page to stdout. This option
is not required in conjunction with -H, -T, or
-Z.
- -T[device], --troff-device[=device]
- This option is used to change groff (or possibly troff's)
output to be suitable for a device other than the default. It implies
-t. Examples (provided with Groff-1.17) include dvi,
latin1, ps, utf8, X75 and X100.
- -H[browser], --html[=browser]
- This option will cause groff to produce HTML output, and will
display that output in a web browser. The choice of browser is determined
by the optional browser argument if one is provided, by the
$BROWSER environment variable, or by a compile-time default if that
is unset (usually lynx). This option implies -t, and will
only work with GNU troff.
- -X[dpi], --gxditview[=dpi]
- This option displays the output of groff in a graphical window
using the gxditview program. The dpi (dots per inch) may be
75, 75-12, 100, or 100-12, defaulting to 75; the -12 variants use a
12-point base font. This option implies -T with the X75, X75-12,
X100, or X100-12 device respectively.
- -Z, --ditroff
- groff will run troff and then use an appropriate
post-processor to produce output suitable for the chosen device. If
groff -mandoc is groff, this option is passed to
groff and will suppress the use of a post-processor. It implies
-t.
Getting help¶
- -?, --help
- Print a help message and exit.
- --usage
- Print a short usage message and exit.
- -V, --version
- Display version information.
EXIT STATUS¶
- 0
- Successful program execution.
- 1
- Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
- 2
- Operational error.
- 3
- A child process returned a non-zero exit status.
- 16
- At least one of the pages/files/keywords didn't exist or wasn't
matched.
ENVIRONMENT¶
- MANPATH
- If $MANPATH is set, its value is used as the path to search for
manual pages.
- MANROFFOPT
- The contents of $MANROFFOPT are added to the command line every
time man invokes the formatter (nroff, troff, or
groff).
- MANROFFSEQ
- If $MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of
preprocessors to pass each manual page through. The default preprocessor
list is system dependent.
- MANSECT
- If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections
and it is used to determine which manual sections to search and in what
order. The default is "1 n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7",
unless overridden by the SECTION directive in
/etc/manpath.config.
- MANPAGER, PAGER
- If $MANPAGER or $PAGER is set ($MANPAGER is used in
preference), its value is used as the name of the program used to display
the manual page. By default, pager -s is used.
The value may be a simple command name or a command with arguments, and may
use shell quoting (backslashes, single quotes, or double quotes). It may
not use pipes to connect multiple commands; if you need that, use a
wrapper script, which may take the file to display either as an argument
or on standard input.
- MANLESS
- If $MANLESS is set, its value will be used as the default prompt
string for the less pager, as if it had been passed using the
-r option (so any occurrences of the text $MAN_PN will be
expanded in the same way). For example, if you want to set the prompt
string unconditionally to “my prompt string”, set
$MANLESS to
‘-Psmy prompt string’. Using the
-r option overrides this environment variable.
- BROWSER
- If $BROWSER is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of
commands, each of which in turn is used to try to start a web browser for
man --html. In each command, %s is replaced by a
filename containing the HTML output from groff, %% is
replaced by a single percent sign (%), and %c is replaced by a
colon (:).
- SYSTEM
- If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had been
specified as the argument to the -m option.
- MANOPT
- If $MANOPT is set, it will be parsed prior to man's command
line and is expected to be in a similar format. As all of the other
man specific environment variables can be expressed as command line
options, and are thus candidates for being included in $MANOPT it
is expected that they will become obsolete. N.B. All spaces that should be
interpreted as part of an option's argument must be escaped.
- MANWIDTH
- If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the line length for which
manual pages should be formatted. If it is not set, manual pages will be
formatted with a line length appropriate to the current terminal (using
the value of $COLUMNS, an ioctl(2) if available, or falling
back to 80 characters if neither is available). Cat pages will only be
saved when the default formatting can be used, that is when the terminal
line length is between 66 and 80 characters.
- MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING
- Normally, when output is not being directed to a terminal (such as to a
file or a pipe), formatting characters are discarded to make it easier to
read the result without special tools. However, if
$MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING is set to any non-empty value, these
formatting characters are retained. This may be useful for wrappers around
man that can interpret formatting characters.
- MAN_KEEP_STDERR
- Normally, when output is being directed to a terminal (usually to a
pager), any error output from the command used to produce formatted
versions of manual pages is discarded to avoid interfering with the
pager's display. Programs such as groff often produce relatively
minor error messages about typographical problems such as poor alignment,
which are unsightly and generally confusing when displayed along with the
manual page. However, some users want to see them anyway, so, if
$MAN_KEEP_STDERR is set to any non-empty value, error output will
be displayed as usual.
- LANG, LC_MESSAGES
- Depending on system and implementation, either or both of $LANG and
$LC_MESSAGES will be interrogated for the current message locale.
man will display its messages in that locale (if available). See
setlocale(3) for precise details.
FILES¶
- /etc/manpath.config
- man-db configuration file.
- /usr/share/man
- A global manual page hierarchy.
- /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
- A traditional global index database cache.
- /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
- An FHS compliant global index database cache.
SEE ALSO¶
apropos(1),
groff(1),
less(1),
manpath(1),
nroff(1),
troff(1),
whatis(1),
zsoelim(1),
setlocale(3),
manpath(5),
ascii(7),
latin1(7),
man(7),
catman(8),
mandb(8), the man-db package manual,
FSSTND
HISTORY¶
1990, 1991 – Originally written by John W. Eaton (jwe@che.utexas.edu).
Dec 23 1992: Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) applied bug fixes supplied by Willem
Kasdorp (wkasdo@nikhefk.nikef.nl).
30th April 1994 – 23rd February 2000: Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk)
has been developing and maintaining this package with the help of a few
dedicated people.
30th October 1996 – 30th March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco
<fpolacco@debian.org> maintained and enhanced this package for the
Debian project, with the help of all the community.
31st March 2001 – present day: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>
is now developing and maintaining man-db.