The man or manual page in linux is used for providing the documentation of the commands in linux There are 8 sections into which man pages are divided. They are as Listed below:

Section Description
1 User commands
2 System calls
3 Library functions
4 Special files
5 File formats
6 Games
7 Conventions and miscellany
8 Administration and privileged commands






But sometimes you don't know which command to execute and for that kind of situation you can use the following commands:

1.apropos "keyword": This command prints the command names matching the keyword you specify and you can then open man page and read about the command and hence can easily know which command to execute without knowing the exact command name.

For ex: apropos print

2. man -k "keyword": This command produces the list of all the pages that match the keyword specified. Prefer apropos it's name makes much more sense and perhaps that is why it was designed .



To Print a man page use the following command

  • man -t sudo | lpr : what this command does is it prints the man page for sudo because here a pipe is used to redirect the output of man page to the printer using lpr command.




To convert a man page to pdf document use the following command

  • man -t sudo | ps2pdf -sudo_man_page.pdf : Here the ps2pdf command converts the output of man page of sudo command to pdf version.