man -k xyz will search for any man page with xyz in it. You can also do man stdio to see what's in the stdio library.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
7 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
8662 readers
742 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
There's also apropos which does the same thing but for some reason is easier for me to remember.
ls /usr/share/man/man?/* will show you all the man pages on your system. I used to pick ones at random.
Originally there were a number of manuals. Manual 1 had user commands. Manual 2 had system calls. Etc. You can type man NUMBER intro to read about that manual. You can also use man -k or appropos but I've also just used grep. These days they're compressed so zgrep.
On Archlinux at least, the glibc package includes info pages for C functions. Just type info libc at the command line, or use info inside emacs. There are hyperlinks in info pages, it's a nicer interface than man pages.
On Debian, there is a package that displays system documentation including, if I remember correctly, man pages. I think I had to set up a local web server first.