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I wonder why FreeBsd love to use man in various places, for example:

FreeBsd Man Pages - This interface will allow you to browse through 10,500+ Unix related topics

Even in that page description, it says:

This interface will allow you to browse through 10,500+ Unix related topics. Each man page is translated by using manServer. You can also view these man pages in a unix shell by using the man program. Many of these utilities are available online for our customers to use. Those using the Solaris platform can find online man pages at docs.sun.com.

Notice the words man page, manServer and man program. What are those man actually mean?

Community
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3 Answers3

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man is the manual page display program on all UNIX-like systems, including the BSDs. Like your quote says, these manual pages are a quite extensive and in many cases the primary documentation on programs (section 1), system calls (2), library functions (3), device files (4), general conventions (5) and system administration topics and concepts (8).

The man pages are the best friends of anyone trying to learn his way with UNIX. Use them, and use them often. When you have a new program foo, skim the output of man foo first.

thiton
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"man" is short for "manual", and it's the name of the program you can use to display a manual (the "man page") for most command line tools by typing man toolname at the command line. manServer is apparently a program that converts these man pages to HTML so they can be displayed on that webpage.

Michael Borgwardt
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As the quoted text mentions, it is a program. Used to display textual help pages (called man pages for the sake of brevity). These pages serve as a reference of the whole OS, including all standard commands and tools, so they are a great help to learn the quirks of the system.

This is a standard Unix tool, available on all varieties of the OS.