How to Find a Specific Manual Page on man.archlinux.org

Updated

Use the site's search form (top of the page or in the sidebar of any manual page) to look up a page by name, or search keywords across page names and descriptions. If you already know the package, section, or language, the URL addressing scheme gets you there directly. The site indexes 83,633 manual pages and 8,796 symbolic links from 3,790 Arch Linux packages, so a targeted lookup is usually faster than browsing.

Search by name or keyword

The search form appears both at the top of the site and in the sidebar of every manual page. It matches against manual page names and descriptions, as well as package names, so you can start from either a command name or a rough description of what you need.

If you prefer searching from your browser's address bar, the site supports the !archman DuckDuckGo bang, which sends your query straight to Arch manual pages.

Use the listing form

The listing form returns all manual pages that match your filtering and sorting criteria. This is the better option when you want to see a set of related pages rather than one exact hit — for example, every page in a given section or package.

Go straight to a URL

Manual pages are addressable with this pattern:

/man/<package>/<section>/<page>.<language>.<format>

Every part except the page name is optional:

Part What it does Default if omitted
package Disambiguates a page that exists in multiple packages Looked up in core, then extra, then multilib
section Picks the section when a page name exists in several Redirects to the first match in the order 1, n, l, 8, 6, 3, 0, 2, 5, 7, 4, 9
language Selects the page language en (also the fallback when no other language exists)
format Output format html (also supports txt and raw)

So a bare page name resolves through the default package order and section order, while adding a package or section narrows the result when the name is ambiguous.

Sections and non-standard cases

Manual pages are organized into the traditional sections; each has an introduction page worth reading: intro(1), intro(2), intro(3), intro(4), intro(5), intro(6), intro(7), intro(8). Some packages place manuals in a subsection (such as 3ssl), and some use non-standard sections (such as 0 or n), so a page you can't find in the usual numbered sections may still exist under one of these.

Symbolic links

Symbolic links such as bunzip2(1) are implemented as HTTP redirects with status 302, so requesting the link name lands you on the real page. They also appear in per-package listings, for example core/openssl.

Verify you have the right page

Check the package and section in the page header or URL against what you expected. If a name exists in several packages, the default lookup may have landed on a different package than the one installed on your system — add the package segment to the URL to confirm. If the page isn't in the language you wanted, the site may have served the English fallback.

Common snags

  • Page not found under the expected section: try the subsection or non-standard section variants, or search by keyword instead.
  • Wrong package's version: the default order is core, extra, multilib; specify the package explicitly.
  • No indexable page at all: some packages simply don't ship indexable manual pages (11,859 packages fall into this category), so absence from the site doesn't mean the command lacks documentation elsewhere.