3 ms·

What does the (8) in ping(8) signify?

• ruuda 4y ago
  The section of the system man pages. It's often used to disambiguate a tool from a libc function, when there are two manpages with the same name, but in different sections.
• tobinfricke 4y ago
  I believe it's an old convention of indicating what section of the manpages describes the command. Section 8 is "superuser and system administration commands". https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
• iamevn 4y ago
  It's the category for ping's man page (System administration commands and daemons).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]