Access manpage(2) on OS X

Question

In Mac OS X, at the end of the chmod man page, it shows

See also: chmod(2)

But when I enter

man chmod(2)

It says that there is no such man page. How can I access the man page chmod(2) man page? Is there a command to do this, or us it only accessible through the internet?

Answer 1

You specify the section first:

man 2 chmod

See man man for tons of information (although not so much in the Mac OS X version), including the meaning of the section numbers; 2 is for system calls, so the chmod(2) manpage describes the chmod system call provided by the kernel.

On Mac OS X the system call manpages are provided in Xcode Tools, which need to be installed for all this to work; see the documentation at the top of the on-line version of chmod(2).