Browse and Discover Manpages
How do you discover system builtins for C functions? The man pages for the C functions on Linux are great, but only if you know the name of the function. Is there a way to see a detailed table of contents, or to browse Manpages on a Linux distro?
I wrote a little script to browse Manpages: woman using
fzfto create such a browser. Just runwomanwithout arguments to see the full list.I think you would need to change the variable
sections='1,8,6,5,7', so it access only specific Manpages. In example1stands for executable programs or shell commands. More about the sections in the DESCRIPTION of the man command itself:man manman -k xyzwill search for any man page withxyzin it. You can also doman stdioto see what's in the stdio library.There's also
aproposwhich does the same thing but for some reason is easier for me to remember.ls /usr/share/man/man?/*will show you all the man pages on your system. I used to pick ones at random.Originally there were a number of manuals. Manual 1 had user commands. Manual 2 had system calls. Etc. You can type
man NUMBER introto read about that manual. You can also useman -korapproposbut I've also just used grep. These days they're compressed so zgrep.On Archlinux at least, the glibc package includes info pages for C functions. Just type info libc at the command line, or use info inside emacs. There are hyperlinks in info pages, it's a nicer interface than man pages.
On Debian, there is a package that displays system documentation including, if I remember correctly, man pages. I think I had to set up a local web server first.