Man page Sections¶

The traditional man page <section> is a digit from 1 to 8.

<name>.1

<name>.2

<name>.3

<name>.4

<name>.5

<name>.6

<name>.7

<name>.8

Classic man page sections.

In older commercial Unix systems, the 3 characters l, n, and o were also used as section names. This is today deprecated, but there are still documents in this format.

<name>.l

<name>.n

<name>.o

Deprecated man page sections, which stood for “local”, “new”, and “old”, respectively.

Man page Group Extensions¶

The <group> extension in .<section>[<group>] is optional, but it can be any string of word characters. Usually programmers use a group name that is already used, e.g. x for X Window System documents or tcl to refer to the Tcl programming language.

Examples:

groff.1

is the man page for groff in section 1 without a group

xargs.1posix.gz

is the man page for the program xargs in section 1 and group posix; moreover it is compressed with gz (gzip).

config.5ssl

OpenSSL CONF library configuration files from section 5 with group ssl.

dpkg-reconfigure.8cdebconf

man page for the program dpkg-reconfigure in section 8 and group cdebconf.

Source of man pages¶

There are 2 roff languages for writing man pages: man and mdoc.

The names of these 2 styles are taken as extensions for the source code files of man pages in the groff package.

<name>.man

traditional Unix-like man page format within groff source files.

<name>.n

A temporary man page file produced from a name.man man page by a run of make within the groff source package.

<name>.mdoc

Man page format in BSD.

<name>.1b

Man page format in heirloom roff .

<name>.mandoc

Files using this extension recognize both man page formats in groff and other processors.

Files Using Macro Packages¶

The classical roff languages were interpreted by the traditional troff and nroff programs.

There were several roff languages, each represented by a macro-package. Each of these provided a suitable file name extension:

<name>.me

roff file using the me macro package.

<name>.mm

roff file using the mm macro package

<name>.ms

roff file using the ms macro package

All of these classical roff languages and their extensions are still very active in groff.

Source Code for Macro Packages (TMAC Files)¶

In traditional roff the source code for the macro packages was stored in TMAC files. Their file names have the form:

tmac.<package>,

<package> is the name of the macro package without the leading m character, which is reintegrated by the option -m.

For example, tmac.an is the source for the man macro package.

In the groff source, more suitable file names were integrated, see later on.

Preprocessors¶

Moreover, the following preprocessors were used as filename extension:

<name>.chem

for the integration of chemical formulas

<name>.eqn

for the mathematical use of equations

<name>.pic

graphical tool

<name>.tbl

for tables with tbl

<name>.ref

for files using the prefer preprocessor

Classical Roff Files¶

<name>.t

<name>.tr

for files using the roff language of any kind

Source Code for Macro Packages (TMAC Files)¶

As the classical form tmac.<package_without_m>, of the TMAC file names is quite strange, groff added the following structures:

<package_without_m>.tmac

m<package>.tmac

groff_m<package>.tmac

Files Using new Macro Packages¶

Groff uses the following new macro packages:

<name>.mmse

file with swedish mm macros for groff

<name>.mom

files written in the groff macro package mom

<name>.www

files written in HTML-like groff macros.

Preprocessors and Postprocessors¶

<name>.hdtbl

Heidelberger tables, an alternative to the preprocessor tbl. See groff_hdtbl(7).

<name>.grap

files written for the graphical grap processor.

<name>.grn

for including gremlin(1), pictures, see grn(1).

<name>.pdfroff

transform this file with pdfroff of the groff system