66a68a9523
We do not want to move POSIX utilities into subsections since they have standard names, but we can do whatever we want with Applications :^). This is particularly advantageous as many applications contain several images, which declutters the man1 directory.
3.4 KiB
Name
man - SerenityOS manual system
Description
The SerenityOS manual pages, or "man pages", document various parts of the operating system for users and developers. They are one of the two parts of the SerenityOS documentation.
The other part of the SerenityOS documentation is the developer documentation, which can be found in the Documentation folder in the repository (online link). The developer documentation is focused on setting up a SerenityOS installation and workflow, as well as contributing to its development.
Note that documentation might cover standardized topics (such as standard POSIX C library functions) or SerenityOS-specific extensions (such as custom file formats). SerenityOS intends to be spec-complaint with industry standard specifications. Non-compliance with a particular specification should be documented in the relevant sections.
Programs
There are three ways of accessing the manual pages:
Help(1) provides a graphical user interface for the man pages.man(1) implements the standard POSIX utility by accessing the man pages in the terminal.- You can also choose to open the underlying Markdown files (see Organization) directly.
Organization
Each SerenityOS manual page is a Markdown (.md) file under /usr/share/man. The main sections live in the subdirectories man1 through man8. Subsections are found within these directories.
Sections
The SerenityOS manual is split into the following sections, or chapters:
- User Programs - manuals for regular user applications and utilities
- System Calls - SerenityOS system call interface documentation
- Library Functions - SerenityOS C library function documentation
- Special Files - documentation for pseudo-files of the SerenityOS virtual file system
- File Formats - documentation for SerenityOS-specific file formats
- Games - manuals for SerenityOS games
- Miscellanea - various documentation that fits in no other category
- Sysadmin Tools - manuals for services and utilities intended for system administration
Sections are subject to change in the future.
Subsections
Subsections exist to organize various large collections of topics within one main section. Subsections have their own pages (often a table of contents or general overview), so they are a category and a page at the same time. Subsections can be arbitrarily nested.
The currently existing subsections are not listed here, as they are subject to frequent change.
Naming
Manpages are named via standard POSIX convention, where the section number follows the page name in brackets. For example, this page is called man(7), but there's also a page called man(1) (the program named man) and a page named Mitigations(7). This naming convention also applies to subsections.
For pages in subsections, conventional directory notation with slashes is used. For example, the page Widget/Button in the subsection GML(5) has the full name GML/Widget/Button(5).
When you open a page via command-line arguments, the section is specified separately before the page name, for example 7 man, 1 man, or 7 Mitigations.