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What is 1? What is 3? What are the numbers called and is there a full list with explanations?

$ whatis nvim
nvim (1)             - edit text

$ whatis printf
printf (3)           - formatted output conversion
printf (1)           - format and print data

Thanks :)

Bog
  • 989
  • Those are parentheses, not brackets. – RonJohn Apr 11 '23 at 15:45
  • @RonJohn oh yeah you are right. My bad, was tired when I wrote that question ^^ – Bog Apr 12 '23 at 07:52
  • No need to be mean an downvote, I think, so +1. – j4nd3r53n Apr 12 '23 at 09:03
  • @RonJohn Americans say 'parenthesis', but the British say 'round bracket' – j4nd3r53n Apr 12 '23 at 09:04
  • @j4nd3r53n thank you very much^^ Yeah Stack Overflow is a very toxic place, but on this question I can kinda understand it. The problem is I didn't even know what to search the internet for, because I didn't know the name of it. But of course it is a duplicate, still thanks for being kind :) – Bog Apr 13 '23 at 06:52

1 Answers1

6

This is section numbers, according to man man:

The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages they contain.

1 Executable programs or shell commands
2 System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3 Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4 Special files (usually found in /dev)
5 File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g.
man(7), groff(7), man-pages(7)
8 System administration commands (usually only for root)
9 Kernel routines [Non standard]

Ex:

man 3 printf # C Linux Programmer's Manual
man 1 printf # User Commands

man -k printf

[...]
sprintf (3)          - formatted output conversion
swprintf (3)         - formatted wide-character output conversion
vasprintf (3)        - print to allocated string
[...]
Gilles Quénot
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