A manual page for a program, command or API function under UNIX. Man pages may be viewed using the man UNIX command, emacs or the GNOME help viewer.

The man page help system has now been superseded by the info pages help system.

Man pages are the documentation of a UNIX system. They're a very handy tool that provides information quickly. I am rather annoyed at GNU's decision to use texinfo for documentation; with texinfo, finding what you need becomes more involved, since you can't do a nice flat search.

This also reminds me of a joke I heard once: A woman walked up to a sysadmin, and complained that the man command was sexist. So he created a symbolic link named "woman" pointing at man and told the lady that "woman" works too. She nodded and went back to her work, satisfied. He never heard from her again.
The problem with man pages is that they are designed to be reference material, rather than tutorials, and they are typically very good quick references and horrible tutorials. (There are exceptions, of course.)

Frequently, man pages assume you already know what you are looking for, and just need the details.

As a result of this, if you are trying to learn a new concept from man pages, you may find yourself following circular references and reading a loop of pages several times to grok it all.

texinfo, on the other hand, was designed to present both a tutorial and a reference guide. Usually, texinfo collections are good tutorials, but their quality as reference material is only as good as the cross references, index, and table of contents put in them.

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