MAN.CONF(5)

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.db(5) 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 OpenBSD 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 | value | used by -T | purpose
     | | |
    fragment | none | html | print only body
    includes | string | html | path to header files
    indent | integer | ascii, utf8 | left margin
    man | string | html | path for links
    paper | string | ps, pdf | paper size
    style | string | html | CSS file
    toc | none | html | print table of contents
    width | integer | ascii, utf8 | right margin

_whatdb path/whatis.db
    This directive provides the same functionality as manpath, but using a historic and misleading syntax. It is kept for backward compatibility for now, but will eventually be removed.

FILES
/etc/man.conf

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

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

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), makewhatis(8)

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

AUTHORS
Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>