[Gllug] command(number)

[Stephen Nelson-Smith]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 4:27 PM, t.clarke <tim at seacon.co.uk> wrote:
> Re:  references to command(8)   command(1)  etc
>
>  The only references I have seen like this refer to manual pages.
>
>  The man pages are organised into sections I believe.

Linux sees all the man pages on a system as part of a single manual.
This manual is divided into sections:

    1 Executable programs or shell commands
    2 System calls
    3 Library calls
    4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
    5 File formats and conventions
    6 Games
    7 Miscellaneous
    8 System administration commands
    9 Nonstandard kernel routines
    n New documentation, which may be moved later
    l Local documentation, specific to your system

Each individual program, utility, or function has its own page in this
manual, like a page in a book. Finding the man page for a program or
command is usually as easy as typing man foo, where foo is the name of
the program.

The references the OP mentions, eg grep(1) referr man grep in section 1.

You can look at that section with:

$ man 1 grep

Some man pages are in more than one section. man foo will only display
the first one. You can list all of them with the -f switch:

$ man -f man
man (1)   an interface to the online reference manuals
man (7)   macros to format man pages

S.
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