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Man Pages

Linux distributions include man pages for most standard commands, system calls, and standard library functions.The man pages are divided into numbered sections; for programmers, the most important are these:
(1) User commands
(2) System calls
(3) Standard library functions
(8) System/administrative commands
The numbers denote man page sections. Linux's man pages come installed on your system; use the man command to access them. To look up a man page, simply invoke man name, where name is a command or function name.
% man sleep
% man 3 sleep
If you're not sure which command or function you want, you can perform a keyword search on the summary lines, using man -k keyword.

Cem Ozdogan 2007-05-16