Chapter 18. Writing Manual Pages

The man command prints the online "manual page" for commands, system calls, functions, devices and file formats. Developers creating new software also need to create manual pages for their programs. This in turn requires a basic understanding of the Unix troff text-processing program and the man macro package.

This chapter presents the following topics:

• Introduction

• Overview of nroff/troff

• Alphabetical summary of the man macros

• Predefined strings

• Names used internally by the man macros

• Sample document