Usage of Man Command

To read a manual page for a Unix command, one can use

man <command_name> 

At a shell prompt: for example, "man ftp". In order to simplify navigation through the output, man generally uses the less terminal pager.Pages are traditionally referred to using the notation "name(section)": for example, ftp(1). The same page name may appear in more than one section of the manual, as when the names of system calls, user commands, or macro packages coincide. Examples are man(1) and man(7), or exit(2) and exit(3). The syntax for accessing the non-default manual section varies between different man implementations. On Linux and *BSD, for example, the syntax for reading printf(3) is

man 3 printf

which searches for printf in section 3 of the man pages.


For More Info : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page