man-pages is an open source command-line application that provides users with an easy way to view and read documentation for many Linux applications in the man page format. It is a CLI (Command-line Interface) program that has been used in Linux and UNIX-like operating system from the beginning of this cognitive computing era. At the moment it is maintained by Michael Kerrisk.
View HOWTOs, FAQs and info files
The program allows users to view HOWTOs, FAQs and info files for any application, system call, special device and library routine that comes with documentation. This means that if a certain program doesn’t include a man page, the application cannot display one for it.
How it really works?
Simple, any Linux/UNIX application or library package that is installed will also install its documentation files (if available) in a specified folder. The man-pages software will index, access and display these manual pages at the request of the user. Users will be able to use several options when operating the program, such as whatis, apropos, search for text in all pages, interpret page argument as local filename, define the locale, use manual pages from other systems, or use colon separated section list.
In addition, the application lets you to look for pages case-insensitively or case-sensitively, view all manual pages matching a regexp or wildcard, display ASCII translation of various latin1 characters, use groff to format manual pages, use a specified web browser app to display the HTML output, and much more.
It’s available in all GNU/Linux systems
For those of you who know your way around the Git software, we recommend using the following command in order to obtain the latest sources of the project: git clone http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages. However, rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux will always have the latest version of man-pages installed. These days 99.99% of all Linux distributions include the man-page package.
