MAN.CONF(5)                   File Formats Manual                  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 Xr 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

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>

Linux 6.8.7-arch1-1            February 10, 2020           Linux 6.8.7-arch1-1