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Re: Complete list of Open Group man pages


On 4/6/2012 7:15 AM, Wayne Newberry wrote:
ed.1p

I propose copying the contents of this into that file:


https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

The following is a list of man3 items that have an entry in the m1 man
pages directory but no entry in the m3 directory.
My question is whether these files should be placed in m3 as well.
The same question applies to some of the files later in the list.

free.3

...etc...


No. free(1) and free(3) are very different things.

Other entries on your list vary in how closely related they are between the sections, but in all cases, they need to be documented separately. Items in section 1 are user programs, while items in section 3 are C programming language functions.

tty.4 (has a man1 man page but no man4 man page)

tty(1) is a program that tells you what your current terminal (tty) is. tty(4) is probably meant to be documentation about terminals in general, or about /dev/tty.


charmap.5
hosts.5
locale.5 (has a man1 man page but no man5 man page)
networks.5
passwd.5 (has a man1 man page but no man5 man page)
protocols.5
services.5

By the filenames, I see they're using section 5 for configuration file documentation. (The contents of sections 4 and 5 are probably the least well agreed upon between *ix systems.)


So, locale(5) describes /usr/lib/locale/* and such, whereas locale(1) is a program for getting and setting locale related information.

I doubt we have charmap(1), hosts(1), networks(1), protocols(1) or services(1) programs in Cygwin. If we do, their man pages belong to their individual packages.

intro.6 (has a man3 man page but no man6 man page)

intro(3) is introductory material to the platform's C programming interface.


intro(6) is introductory material for the games available on the platform.

If we have an intro manpage in one section, we should probably have one in all of them.

Personally, I think we could do without all of them, since the days of printed and bound Unix manuals are long gone. These are artifacts of those days; they were the first manpages to appear in each book.


sync.8 (has a man1 man page but no man8 man page)

Yeah, that's just the way that one is.


Section 8 is for administrative programs, and section 1 for programs any user can run.

/bin/sync is a bit of a crossover. It's a low-level system sort of program, but on many OSes any user can run it, since it's more or less harmless. (It's almost woo magic, actually.) So, some systems will place this program's manual in section 1, others in 8, and neither will have a strong argument that they're unequivocally right.


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