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2.3 - Manual Pages

OpenBSD comes with extensive documentation in the form of manual pages, as well as longer documents relating to specific applications. Considerable effort is made to make sure the man pages are up-to-date and accurate. In all cases, the man pages are considered the authoritative source of information for OpenBSD. To access the manual pages and other documentation, be sure that you installed the man35.tgz and misc35.tgz file sets. Here is a list of some of the most useful manual pages for new users:

Getting Started

1. afterboot(8) - things to check after the first complete boot.
2. help(1) - help for new users and administrators.
3. hier(7) - layout of filesystems.
4. man(1) - display the on-line manual pages.
5. intro(1) - introduction to general commands, also see the intros to the other sections of the manual: intro(2), intro(3), intro(4) (note: intro(4) is platform specific), intro(5), intro(6), intro(7), intro(8), and intro(9).
6. adduser(8) - command for adding new users.
7. vipw(8) - edit the master password file.
8. disklabel(8) - read and write disk pack label.
9. reboot, halt(8) - stop and restart the system.
10. shutdown(8) - close down the system at a given time.
11. dmesg(8) - redisplay the kernel boot messages
12. sudo(8) - don't log in as root, but run commands as root.
13. mg(1) - emacs-like text editor.

For more advanced users

1. boot(8) - system bootstrapping procedures.
2. login.conf(5) - format of the login class configuration file.
3. ifconfig(8) - configure network interface parameters.
4. netstat(1) - show network status.
5. boot_config(8) - how to change kernel configuration at boot.
6. release(8) - build an OpenBSD release.
7. sendbug(1) - send a problem report (PR) about OpenBSD to a central support site.
8. sysctl(8) - get or set kernel state.
9. style(9) - OpenBSD kernel source code style guide.

In general, if you know the name of a command or a manual page, you can read it by executing "man command". For example: "man vi" to read about the vi editor. If you don't know the name of the command, or if "man command" doesn't find the manual page, you can search the manual page database by executing "apropos something" or "man -k something", where "something" is a likely word that might appear in the title of the manual page you're looking for. For example:

# apropos "time zone"

tzfile (5) - time zone information

zdump (8) - time zone dumper

zic (8) - time zone compiler

The parenthetical numbers indicate the section of the manual in which that page can be found. In some cases, you may find manual pages with identical names living in separate sections of the manual. For example, assume that you want to know the format of the configuration files for the cron daemon. Once you know the section of the manual for the page you want, you would execute "man n command", where n is the manual section number.

# man -k cron

cron (8) - clock daemon

crontab (1) - maintain crontab files for individual users

crontab (5) - tables for driving cron

# man 5 crontab

In addition to the UNIX manual pages, there is a typesettable document set (included in the misc35.tgz file set). It lives in the /usr/share/doc directory. You can format each document set with a "make" in the appropriate subdirectory. The psd subdirectory is the Programmer's Supplementary Documents distribution. The smm subdirectory is the System Manager's Manual. The usd subdirectory is the UNIX User's Supplementary Documents distribution. You can perform your "make" in the three distribution subdirectories, or you can select a specific section of a distribution and do a `make' in its subdirectory. Some of the subdirectories are empty. By default, formatting the documents will result in PostScript output, suitable for printing. The PostScript output can be quite large -- you should assume a 250-300% increase in volume. If you do not have access to a PostScript printer or display, you may also format the documents for reading on a terminal display. Each document subdirectory has a target for building ASCII copies of these papers (called `paper.txt') which can be generated with make(1). For example:

# cd /usr/share/doc/usd/04.csh

# make paper.txt

# more paper.txt

Note that superuser privileges may be required to build documents in these directories, and that issuing make clean will remove any papers generated by a previous make. See /usr/share/doc/README for more details about the documents in /usr/share/doc/. The UNIX manual pages are generally more current and trustworthy than the typesettable documents. The typesettable documents sometimes explain complicated applications in more detail than the manual pages do.

For many, having a hardcopy of the man page can be useful. Here are the guidelines to making a printable copy of a man page.

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