The manual pages are a great source of information for any FreeBSD user. They are categorised into sections (1 through 9) and given a name, usually that of the command which it describes or the topic explained in the manual. An online-manual page can be had with the man command, the general syntax of which is -
man [section] name
More information on the man command itself can be had by typing the following into the terminal -
man man
Each section describes a particular set of commands or aspect of the system. For an introduction to each one of the sections, you can ask the man command to fetch the
intro manual corresponding to it. For example -
man 2 intro
introduces you to section 2 (system calls and error numbers).
Here are some man pages that might be of interest to users of FreeBSD -
- man 4 keyboard - PC keyboard interace.
- man 4 zero - The zero device
- man 4 null - The null device
- man 4 sysmouse - Virtualized mouse driver
- man 5 a.out - Format of executable binary files.
- man 5 fstab - Static info about filesystems.
- man 5 elf - Format of ELF binary executable file.
- man 5 loader.conf - System bootstrap configuration info.
- man 7 tuning - Tuning your freebsd system.
- man 7 sprog - Secure programming manual.
- man 7 security - Introduction to security under FreeBSD.
- man 7 release - Release building infrastructure.
- man 7 ports - Contributed applications.
- man 7 hier - Layout of filesystems in FreeBSD
- man 7 firewalls - Simple firewalls under FreeBSD
- man 7 development - Introduction with development with the FreeBSD codebase.
- man 7 build - Information on how to build the system
- man 8 crash - FreeBSD system failures
- man 8 rc - Command scripts for auto-reboot and daemon startup.
- man 8 picobsd - Floppy based FreeBSD.
- man 8 diskless - Booting a system over a network.