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man ls
means that all sections of the manual pages are searched for information on the ls command.
You can also search the man pages by keyword using the -k flag. For example, if you type:
man -k passwd
you are bound to get at least two separate entries for passwd. One will read passwd(1) and the other will read passwd(5). The numbers refer to the man page section numbers we read about before.
Searches can be limited to a particular section of the manual. For example, to search the fifth section of the manual for the passwd command on a Linux machine, you would type:
man 5 passwd
On a Sun, you would type:
man -s 5 passwd
Compare this entry to the one in the first section of the manual.
Finally, a man man entry will print a list of all the options for man as well as complete instructions on how to do searches by section, keyword, filename, etc.
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