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MAN.CONF

Section: File Formats (5)
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BSD mandoc

NAME

man.conf - configuration file for man

DESCRIPTION

This is the configuration file for the man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8) utilities. Its presence, and all directives, are optional.

This file is an ASCII text file. Leading whitespace on lines, lines starting with `#' and blank lines are ignored. Words are separated by whitespace. The first word on each line is the name of a configuration directive.

The following directives are supported:

manpath path

Override the default search path for man(1), apropos(1), and makewhatis(8). It can be used multiple times to specify multiple paths, with the order determining the manual page search order.

Each path is a tree containing subdirectories whose names consist of the strings `man' and/or `cat' followed by the names of sections, usually single digits. The former are supposed to contain unformatted manual pages in mdoc(7) and/or man(7) format; file names should end with the name of the section preceded by a dot. The latter should contain preformatted manual pages; file names should end with `.0'

Creating a mandoc.db5 database with makewhatis(8) in each directory configured with manpath is recommended and necessary for apropos(1) to work, and also for man(1) on operating systems like Ox that install each manual page with only one file name in the file system, even if it documents multiple utilities or functions.

output option [value ]

Configure the default value of an output option. These directives are overridden by the -O command line options of the same names. For details, see the mandoc(1) manual.

option Ta value Ta used by -T Ta purpose
Ta Ta Ta
fragment Ta none Ta html Ta print only body
includes Ta string Ta html Ta path to header files
indent Ta integer Ta ascii , utf8 Ta left margin
man Ta string Ta html Ta path for links
paper Ta string Ta ps , pdf Ta paper size
style Ta string Ta html Ta CSS file
toc Ta none Ta html Ta print table of contents
width Ta integer Ta ascii , utf8 Ta right margin

FILES

/etc/man.conf

EXAMPLES

The following configuration file reproduces the defaults: installing it is equivalent to not having a file at all.

manpath /usr/share/man
manpath /usr/X11R6/man
manpath /usr/local/man

HISTORY

A relatively complicated file format first appeared in BSD 4.3 Reno For Ox 5.8 , it was redesigned from scratch, aiming for simplicity.

AUTHORS

An Ingo Schwarze Aq Mt schwarze@openbsd.org