AIX Tip of the Week

Installing and Using AIX "man" Pages

Audience: Users

Date: March 9, 2001

The "man" command provides online help for AIX commands. The most common form is

man command

which lists the help page for "command". If you don't know the name of a command, or if you want to find related information, use the "-k" search option:

man -k searchstring

Man pages are not installed by default in AIX. The following filesets must be installed for man to work. The filesets are located on the AIX Base Documentation CD.

    bos.html.en_US.topnav.navigate - Top Level Navigation
    bos.html.en_US.nav             - Online Navigation
    bos.html.en_US.cmds.cmds1      - AIX Commands Reference 1
    bos.html.en_US.cmds.cmds2      - AIX Commands Reference 2
    bos.html.en_US.cmds.cmds3      - AIX Commands Reference 3
    bos.html.en_US.cmds.cmds4      - AIX Commands Reference 4
    bos.html.en_US.cmds.cmds5      - AIX Commands Reference 5
    bos.html.en_US.cmds.cmds6      - AIX Commands Reference 6

The following filesets are optional, for AIX system calls and C library functions, respectively.

    bos.html.en_US.techref.base  - AIX Base Tech Ref
    bos.html.en_US.techref.commo - AIX Commo Tech Ref

Bruce Spencer,
baspence@us.ibm.com