About Oracle Solaris Man Pages

Oracle Solaris includes extensive reference materials that are known as man pages. Each page is a self-contained document that describes one or more UNIX constructs. A man page could describe a command, library function, file format, or a device driver. For virtually every Oracle Solaris command, a man page is provided. The collective man pages, organized alphabetically and by sections, comprise a reference manual.

A man page is intended to answer concisely the question, “What does the command (or construct) do?” A man page is not a tutorial or a technical analysis of Oracle Solaris internals. Also, man pages do not document detailed procedures. However, man pages do provide examples of command usage.

To display a man page, type the command man command-name in a terminal window. For example, to display the man page for the boot command, you would type the following:

$ man boot
Reformatting page.  Please Wait... done  System Administration Commands boot(1M)
NAME      boot - start the system kernel or a standalone program
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