Editing Man page (section)

==Command usage==
To read a manual page for a Unix command, a user can type:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
man <command_name>
</syntaxhighlight>

Pages are traditionally referred to using the notation "name(section)": for example, {{man|1|ftp|FreeBSD||inline}}. The section refers to different ways the topic might be referenced - for example, as a system call, or a shell (command line) command or package, or a package's configuration file, or as a coding construct / header.

The same page name may appear in more than one section of the manual, such as when the names of [[system call]]s, user [[Command (computing)|command]]s, or [[Troff macro|macro packages]] coincide. Examples are {{man|1|man|ManKier||inline}} and {{man|7|man|ManKier||inline}}, or {{man|2|exit|Linux||inline}} and {{man|3|exit|Linux||inline}}. The syntax for accessing the non-default manual section varies between different man implementations. 

On Solaris and illumos, for example, the syntax for reading {{man|3c|printf|Solaris||inline}} is:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
man -s 3c printf
</syntaxhighlight>
On Linux and BSD derivatives the same invocation would be:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
man 3 printf
</syntaxhighlight>

which searches for ''[[printf]]'' in section 3 of the man pages.  The actual file name likely includes the section. Continuing this example, printf.3.gz would be a compressed manual page file in section 3 for ''[[printf]]''.