What Is man.archlinux.org?

Updated

man.archlinux.org is a web repository of all manual pages shipped by Arch Linux packages. It is not itself a manual page for a program; it is a browsable, searchable index of the documentation contained in the distribution's package repositories. Use it when you want to read a man page without installing the package, or when you need to check which package provides a given page.

What the site contains

The site indexes manual pages from the Arch Linux package repositories. According to the site's own description, it currently holds 83,633 manual pages and 8,796 symbolic links drawn from 3,790 packages, while another 11,859 packages contain no indexable manual pages.

Pages follow the traditional manual section scheme. The site points readers to the introduction pages for each section: intro(1), intro(2), intro(3), intro(4), intro(5), intro(6), intro(7), and intro(8). Some packages place their documentation in subsections (for example 3ssl), and some use non-standard sections such as 0 or n.

How to find a page

The site describes four ways to locate a specific manual page:

  • Direct search form — available at the top of the site and in the sidebar of every manual page.
  • Keyword search — searches names and descriptions of both manual pages and packages.
  • DuckDuckGo bang — the !archman bang redirects a DuckDuckGo search to Arch manual pages.
  • Listing form — lists all manual pages matching specified filtering and sorting criteria.

You can also construct a URL manually using the addressing scheme /man/<package>/<section>/<page>. Every part except the page name is optional:

URL part Effect if omitted
Package Looked up in repositories in the order core, extra, multilib
Section Redirected to the first page found, checking sections in the order 1, n, l, 8, 6, 3, 0, 2, 5, 7, 4, 9
Language Defaults to en, which is also the fallback for pages not available in other languages
Format Defaults to html; txt and raw are also supported

Package and section together disambiguate a page that exists in multiple packages.

Behavior worth knowing

Symbolic links are not served as separate pages. They are implemented as HTTP redirects with status code 302 — so requesting something like bunzip2(1) sends you to the target page. Symbolic links do appear in per-package listings, such as core/openssl.

The site also publishes a brief summary of recent database updates, showing the time (UTC), duration, number of updated packages, and number of updated man pages for each run. The most recent entries listed show daily refreshes, for example 193 packages and 744 man pages on 2026-10-30.

One clarification the site makes explicitly: its own front page is not an actual manual page — it was simply made to look like one.

When to use it

Reach for man.archlinux.org when you are on a system without the package installed, when you want to compare documentation across packages, or when you need to confirm which package ships a particular page before installing anything. For day-to-day use on an Arch system, the local man command remains the direct route; this site is the reference copy.