4 ms·
What does the (8) mean?
by timw4mail 5y ago
What does the (8) mean?
- loeg 5y agoManual section 8 - “System Manager” commands.
- drran 5y agoman 8 traceroute 8 is section number for this man page.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- drewg123 5y agoIt references the BSD manual section where you can find the documentation. 1 General commands 2 Syscalls 3 Library functions 4 Kernel interfaces 5 File formats 6 Games 7 Misc 8 System commands 9 kernel dev [ EDIT: I have no idea how to make a single-spaced numbered list here.. ]
- Stratoscope 5y ago> I have no idea how to make a single-spaced numbered list here Two spaces at the beginning of each line. This will also make the text monospaced, which you may not always want.
- sigjuice 5y agoQuoting the manual section number is common practice in the OpenBSD project and community. It is used quite heavily in the documentation and on the mailing lists.
- p1mrx 5y agoIt's one of these mystery numbers: $ man printf [goddammit you stupid computer] $ man 3 printf
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoHey, not the computer's fault that you didn't remember to ask for libc instead of the shell command:) (Although I kinda like whatever SUSE did to make it interactive prompt whenever the manual section is ambiguous)
- sulam 5y agoOthers have answered what the 8 means, you might also want to know why it's used, since it may be "obvious" that traceroute is a system utility. In many cases it's not obvious whether one is referring to the syscall, kernel API, system utility, etc, since overloading a single simple word is quite common.
- neuromanser 5y agosee man(1) :)