The Linux man-pages project

The Linux man-pages project documents the Linux kernel and C library interfaces that are employed by user programs. It provides manual pages in the following sections:

• 2: System calls, documenting the system calls, provided by the Linux kernel.
• 3: Library functions, documenting the functions provided by the standard C library (with particular focus on glibc, the GNU C library).
• 4: Devices, which documents details of various devices, most of which reside in /dev.
• 5: Files, which describes various file formats, and includes proc(5), which documents the /proc file system.
• 7: Overviews, conventions, and miscellaneous.

(Note that many of the man pages on a Linux system, especially those in sections other than 2 and 3, come from other packages.)

You can download the latest man-pages tarball here; older tarballs can be found here.

You can browse the manual pages online here.

If you find a bug in a man page, then please report it.

If you want to contribute to work on man-pages, have a look here.

For a list of changes in various man-pages releases, see the changelog.

For information about translations of man-pages, take a look here.

The man-pages maintainer is Michael Kerrisk (mtk in the changelog; mtk.manpages-AT-gmail.com; blog). Starting in May 2008, he works full time on man-pages, thanks to funding from the Linux foundation.