.\" (C) Copyright 1992-1999 Rickard E. Faith and David A. Wheeler
.\" (faith@cs.unc.edu and dwheeler@ida.org)
.\"
+.\" %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM)
.\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
.\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
.\" preserved on all copies.
.\"
.\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
.\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
+.\" %%%LICENSE_END
.\"
.\" Modified Sun Jul 25 11:06:05 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
.\" Modified Sat Jun 8 00:39:52 1996 by aeb
.\" Modified Tue Jul 27 20:12:02 2004 by Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>
.\" 2007-05-30, mtk: various rewrites and moved much text to new man-pages.7.
.\"
-.TH MAN 7 2012-08-05 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
+.TH MAN 7 2019-03-06 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
man \- macros to format man pages
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B groff \-Tascii \-man
.I file
\&...
-.LP
+.PP
.B groff \-Tps \-man
.I file
\&...
-.LP
+.PP
.B man
.RI [ section ]
.I title
.BR man-pages (7).
.SS Title line
The first command in a man page (after comment lines,
-that is, lines that start with \fB.\\"\fP) should be
+that is, lines that start with \fB.\e"\fP) should be
+.PP
.RS
-.sp
.B \&.TH
.I "title section date source manual"
-.sp
.RE
-For details of the arguments that should be supplied to the \fBTH\fP
+.PP
+For details of the arguments that should be supplied to the
+.B TH
command, see
.BR man-pages (7).
.PP
.\" on the same line as
.\" .BR \&.SH ,
.\" then place the heading in double quotes.
-
+.PP
The only mandatory heading is NAME, which should be the first section and
be followed on the next line by a one-line description of the program:
+.PP
.RS
-.sp
\&.SH NAME
.br
-item \\- description
-.sp
+item \e- description
.RE
+.PP
It is extremely important that this format is followed, and that there is a
backslash before the single dash which follows the item name.
This syntax is used by the
.TP
.B \&.SM
Small (useful for acronyms)
-.LP
+.PP
Traditionally, each command can have up to six arguments, but the GNU
implementation removes this limitation (you might still want to limit
yourself to 6 arguments for portability's sake).
respecifying the indent value.
A normal (nonindented) paragraph resets the prevailing indent value
to its default value (0.5 inches).
-By default a given indent is measured in ens;
+By default, a given indent is measured in ens;
try to use ens or ems as units for
indents, since these will automatically adjust to font size changes.
The other key macro definitions are:
.B \&.IP
command.
.SS Hypertext link macros
-(Feature supported with
-.B groff
-only.)
-In order to use hypertext link macros, it is necessary to load the
-.B www.tmac
-macro package.
-Use the request
-.B .mso www.tmac
-to do this.
-.TP 9m
-.BI \&.URL " url link trailer"
-Inserts a hypertext link to the URI (URL)
-.IR url ,
-with
-.I link
-as the text of the link.
-The
-.I trailer
-will be printed immediately afterward.
-When generating HTML this should translate into the HTML command
-\fB<A HREF="\fP\fIurl\fP\fB">\fIlink\fP\fB</A>\fP\fItrailer\fP.
-.\" The following is a kludge to get a paragraph into the listing.
-.TP
-.B " "
-This and other related macros are new, and
-many tools won't do anything with them, but
-since many tools (including troff) will simply ignore undefined macros
-(or at worst insert their text) these are safe to insert.
-.\" The following is a kludge to get a paragraph into the listing.
.TP
-.B " "
-It can be useful to define your own
-.B URL
-macro in manual pages for the benefit of those viewing it with a roff
-viewer other than
-.BR groff .
-That way, the URL, link text, and trailer text (if any) are still visible.
-.\" The following is a kludge to get a paragraph into the listing.
-.TP
-.B " "
-Here's an example:
-.RS 1.5i
-\&.de URL
-.br
-\\\\$2 \\(laURL: \\\\$1 \\(ra\\\\$3
-.br
-\&..
-.br
-\&.if \\n[.g] .mso www.tmac
-.br
-\&.TH
-.I ...
-.br
-.I (later in the page)
-.br
-This software comes from the
-.br
-\&.URL "http://www.gnu.org/" "GNU Project" " of the"
-.br
-\&.URL "http://www.fsf.org/" "Free Software Foundation" .
-.RE
-.\" The following is a kludge to get a paragraph into the listing.
+.BI \&.UR " url"
+Insert a hypertext link to the URI (URL)
+.IR url ,
+with all text up to the following
+.B \&.UE
+macro as the link text.
.TP
-.B " "
-In the above, if
-.B groff
-is being used, the
-.B www.tmac
-macro package's definition of the URL macro will supersede the locally
-defined one.
+.B \&.UE \c
+.RI [ trailer ]
+Terminate the link text of the preceding
+.B \&.UR
+macro, with the optional
+.I trailer
+(if present, usually a closing parenthesis and/or end-of-sentence
+punctuation) immediately following.
+For non-HTML output devices (e.g.,
+.BR "man -Tutf8" ),
+the link text is followed by the URL in angle brackets; if there is no
+link text, the URL is printed as its own link text, surrounded by angle
+brackets.
+(Angle brackets may not be available on all output devices.)
+For the HTML output device, the link text is hyperlinked to the URL; if
+there is no link text, the URL is printed as its own link text.
.PP
-A number of other link macros are available.
-See
-.BR groff_www (7)
-for more details.
+These macros have been supported since GNU Troff 1.20 (2009-01-05) and
+Heirloom Doctools Troff since 160217 (2016-02-17).
.SS Miscellaneous macros
.TP 9m
.B \&.DT
use \ee.
Other sequences you may use, where x or xx are any characters and N
is any digit, include:
-.BR \e' ,
-.BR \e` ,
+.BR \e\(aq ,
+.BR \e\(ga ,
.BR \e- ,
.BR \e. ,
.BR \e" ,
some tools such as
.BR man2html (1)
can automatically turn them into hypertext links.
-You can also use the new
-.B URL
-macro to identify links to related information.
+You can also use the
+.B UR
+and
+.B UE
+macros to identify links to related information.
If you include URLs, use the full URL
(e.g.,
-.UR http://www.kernelnotes.org
+.UR http://www.kernel.org
.UE )
to ensure that tools can automatically find the URLs.
.PP
Tools processing these files should open the file and examine the first
nonwhitespace character.
-A period (.) or single quote (') at the beginning
+A period (.) or single quote (\(aq) at the beginning
of a line indicates a troff-based file (such as man or mdoc).
A left angle bracket (<) indicates an SGML/XML-based
file (such as HTML or Docbook).
Anything else suggests simple ASCII
text (e.g., a "catman" result).
.PP
-Many man pages begin with \fB\'\e"\fP followed by a
+Many man pages begin with \fB\(aq\e"\fP followed by a
space and a list of characters,
indicating how the page is to be preprocessed.
For portability's sake to non-troff translators we recommend
insert cross-references.
By sticking to the safe subset described above, it should be easier to
automate transitioning to a different reference page format in the future.
-.LP
+.PP
The Sun macro
.B TX
is not implemented.
.BR groff_man (7),
.BR groff_www (7),
.BR man-pages (7),
-.BR mdoc (7),
-.BR mdoc.samples (7)
+.BR mdoc (7)