List of all available man pages

Question

How to generate a list of all available man pages on a system?

Answer 1

Use:

apropos .

or:

man -k .

where . is a regex that means: "any character".

Answer 2

# Shell script to list pathname of all available man pages  
mandirs="\`man -w | sed 's/:/ /g'\`"  
find $mandirs -type f  

This produces a list of all man files, using the list of man directories that is produced by "man -w", however, cYrus's any-character-regex solution is much better, pipe though awk to get a clean list of just the page names:

apropos . | awk '{print $1}'

or

man -k . | awk '{print $1}'

Answer 3

Look in the paths listed in /etc/man.config, with the additional directories as added by the FHS or FSSTND directive as appropriate.

Answer 4

Here's my favourite:

whatis -r .

… and if you just want to see all the man pages in a particular section use the -s flag.

For example, if you just wanted to get a list of all man pages for all executable commands (section 1):

whatis -s 1 -r .