Patrick Beart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I keep seeing references in some Linux texts that have
> parenthetical numbers behind them. In the book "DNS and Bind"
> (O'Reilly publishers) there's a reference to "hostname(1)"
> I have pretty much figured out that such things refer to "man
> pages" and I know what those are (I'm new to Linux, but not
> stupid!). However, I'm stumped at the parenthetical
> reference. What the blazes is THIS? Is it a paragraph
> description? ... a section? ... or??
It is the section number, that is it refers to the "chapter" (somewhat
confusingly called section) the manual page in question is residing
in. So it gives the location of the whole man page in question, it
does *not* refer to a section *within* the man page. The sections are
roughly as follows:
1 - User commands
2 - System calls (kernel functions you can call from user programs)
3 - C Library calls ("Helper" functions for developers, if you will)
4 - Devices
5 - Configuration files
6 - Games
7 - Conventions / Stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else
8 - Administration commands
> I tried "man hostname" and read the entire (short)
> description. Nowhere was the "(1)" used. Moreover, trying "man
> hostname(1)" throws an error. What gives?
The (1) is used right in the header of the manpage, and if you scroll
down to the paragraph titled "THE FQDN" you'll see references to
resolver(3), gethostbyname(2) etc.
The section number is given to avoid confusion when one command/topic
might be used differently in different sections - one example would be
read(1) [referring to the bash builtin command to read user input in
scripts] and read(2) [referring to the syscall a (C) programmer would
use to read file contents].
If you do not specify the section, they are all scanned in the order
given above and the first match is displayed - so 'man read' shows
read(1). To get the man page for read(2), you would enter:
man 2 read
(Some other unices use the syntax "man -s 2 read", IIRC).
So long,
Joe
--
"I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear
word processor."
-- Neal Stephenson, "In the beginning... was the command line"
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