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Unix manual pages are created by the man command which finds, prints, and displays entries from the online reference manuals. Man pages are vendor specific by necessity, as individual commands and options to them may vary from operating system to operating system.
Man pages are organized into sections. The content of each section can vary slightly between vendors, however they are basically ordered as follows:
The best way to determine the exact organization of a particular set of man pages is to peruse them. Because man pages are tersely written they can be most helpful for looking up things such as the options to or syntax of a command. They can also be useful for finding out what command performs a particular function, by using the function as the keyword for a keyword search to locate the command. Due to the style in which they're written, man pages are generally not a a good place to go for learning the basics of how a command works.
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