Man page

A man page (short for manual page) is software documentation. It contains documentation about programs, libraries, system calls and configuration files.

Installation
is part of the system set and so already installed on your system. Still you can change the USE flags:

, which provides many basic man pages, is also part of the system set. If you want localized man pages, set the LINGUAS variable in your, e.g. for german:

Most packages install additional man pages. If you want to suppress their installation, add the following feature to your :

man
Man pages can be viewed with man:
 * man 5 ebuild - Shows the ebuild man page of section 5.
 * man ebuild - Shows the ebuild man page of section 1. When there is more than on man page with same name, the first found will be shown.

man uses your pager. Default is less. The default pager can be setup with eselect pager.

You navigate in a man page with the arrow keys. You scroll pagewise with the and  keys. You can search with the key followed by the search term.

A more thorough explanation can be found in the Navigate subpage.

Konqueror
KDE Konqueror can render man pages. Enter in the address bar   followed by the man page name, e.g.:  . If you want to view a specific section, add the section in parentheses, e.g.:  .

apropos
apropos (part of ) can search the whatis database for strings, e.g.:

Alternatives
provides a man replacement that utilizes the Berkeley DB database instead of flat files. As such, handling of manual pages requires a few additional steps (e.g. the  command to update the manual pages database), but it also offers several improvements. Transition to this more modern approach is in progress and can be tracked via the tracker.