4 ms·

Maybe I am! :) I think maybe you are referring to those numbers people used to quote after mentioning a manpage (1) (5) and so on. I totally missed the boat on

Maybe I am! :) I think maybe you are referring to those numbers people used to quote after mentioning a manpage (1) (5) and so on. I totally missed the boat on that one, and never learnt what these designations meant.

lordgrenville 6y ago
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3586/what-do-the-numbers-in-a-man-page-mean https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3586/what-do-the-nu...
_kst_ 6y ago
The numbers, as in "bash(1)" refer to sections of the manual. "Info" is a different documentation format, most commonly used for GNU tools (including bash). The section numbers don't generally apply to info documents. For some tools, the man and info documents have the same information. For some, the man page is a brief summary that directs you to the info documentation. For some, there's only a man page. (And for some there isn't even that.)
cpach 6y ago
Nope :) The joke was referring to the fact that the GNU Project (and thus the Bash project) insists on writing their documentation in the Texinfo format. IIRC for a while they used to have man pages that basically said “just read the Info pages instead”. This is not the case anymore, in Linux distros these days even the GNU tools have decent man pages. Anyway, the Bash manual is actually written in the Texinfo format. It’s not so bad, to be honest :) https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/ https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/
- flukus 6y ago
  Amusingly "info bash" took me to the man page until a separate bash-doc package was installed. One day I'm going to write a script to automatically install missing "-doc" packages and learn to navigate info.
- LukeShu 6y ago
  > even the GNU tools have decent man pages. A large portion of them are just auto-generated from the `--help` output (and --help has always been fairly high quality for GNU tools). Perhaps with a few extra paragraphs sprinkled in. I've found that GNU man pages are often an unhappy medium between the terseness of `--help` and the verbose explanations in the info manuals; and so the GNU man pages are almost never what I want. If I want to just quickly look something up, the man pages are too big and I should have used --help, and if I want to understand something they're too brief and I should have used info. That said, the Bash man page is great (as is the info page). It's always amazed me that the Bash maintainer (Chet Ramey) goes through the trouble of maintaining two entirely separate documents with such detail and quality.
  - benibela 6y ago
    I hate the bash manpage It is so long, I never find anything there And if I search for some command, like /if or /fi, there are far too many ifs in the text to find a useful match
LukeShu 6y ago
The (1) and (5) and so on are the section of "the manual" that is being referred to; "the manual" referring to the entire system manual, and the one command you're looking up being just one page in that manual (hence "man page"). As for what those sections are, `man man` tells me (my system gets this man page from the "man-db" project https://www.nongnu.org/man-db/ https://www.nongnu.org/man-db/ ; your system may use a man page of different authorship, but it should tell you roughly the same thing): 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, e.g. /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] Sometimes the number has a suffix; for example, the "p" suffix as in (1p) or (3p) indicates that the man page is taken from POSIX (and therefore might be missing features that your version has; but also that everything in it can probably be relied on on other systems). Or (3perl) which indicates that it's a Perl library function instead of a C library function. You can tell `man` which section you're looking in like `man 5 passwd`. This is useful for looking up passwd(5) which describes the /etc/passwd file, rather than passwd(1) which describes the `passwd` command to change your password. Or `man 2 signal` to describe the "signal" system-call instead of the signal(3p) libc function, or `man 7 signal` to get an overview and listing of signals.

lordgrenville 6y ago

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3586/what-do-the-numbers-in-a-man-page-mean https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3586/what-do-the-nu...

_kst_ 6y ago

The numbers, as in "bash(1)" refer to sections of the manual. "Info" is a different documentation format, most commonly used for GNU tools (including bash). The section numbers don't generally apply to info documents. For some tools, the man and info documents have the same information. For some, the man page is a brief summary that directs you to the info documentation. For some, there's only a man page. (And for some there isn't even that.)

cpach 6y ago

Nope :) The joke was referring to the fact that the GNU Project (and thus the Bash project) insists on writing their documentation in the Texinfo format. IIRC for a while they used to have man pages that basically said “just read the Info pages instead”. This is not the case anymore, in Linux distros these days even the GNU tools have decent man pages. Anyway, the Bash manual is actually written in the Texinfo format. It’s not so bad, to be honest :) https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/ https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/

flukus 6y ago
Amusingly "info bash" took me to the man page until a separate bash-doc package was installed. One day I'm going to write a script to automatically install missing "-doc" packages and learn to navigate info.
LukeShu 6y ago
> even the GNU tools have decent man pages. A large portion of them are just auto-generated from the `--help` output (and --help has always been fairly high quality for GNU tools). Perhaps with a few extra paragraphs sprinkled in. I've found that GNU man pages are often an unhappy medium between the terseness of `--help` and the verbose explanations in the info manuals; and so the GNU man pages are almost never what I want. If I want to just quickly look something up, the man pages are too big and I should have used --help, and if I want to understand something they're too brief and I should have used info. That said, the Bash man page is great (as is the info page). It's always amazed me that the Bash maintainer (Chet Ramey) goes through the trouble of maintaining two entirely separate documents with such detail and quality.
- benibela 6y ago
  I hate the bash manpage It is so long, I never find anything there And if I search for some command, like /if or /fi, there are far too many ifs in the text to find a useful match

LukeShu 6y ago

The (1) and (5) and so on are the section of "the manual" that is being referred to; "the manual" referring to the entire system manual, and the one command you're looking up being just one page in that manual (hence "man page"). As for what those sections are, `man man` tells me (my system gets this man page from the "man-db" project https://www.nongnu.org/man-db/ https://www.nongnu.org/man-db/ ; your system may use a man page of different authorship, but it should tell you roughly the same thing): 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, e.g. /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] Sometimes the number has a suffix; for example, the "p" suffix as in (1p) or (3p) indicates that the man page is taken from POSIX (and therefore might be missing features that your version has; but also that everything in it can probably be relied on on other systems). Or (3perl) which indicates that it's a Perl library function instead of a C library function. You can tell `man` which section you're looking in like `man 5 passwd`. This is useful for looking up passwd(5) which describes the /etc/passwd file, rather than passwd(1) which describes the `passwd` command to change your password. Or `man 2 signal` to describe the "signal" system-call instead of the signal(3p) libc function, or `man 7 signal` to get an overview and listing of signals.