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I am frustrated that to use man I need to know the exact name of the topic, and usually I need to search on Internet before I can open the man page. How to list installed man pages? How to search for a word inside all installed mans or search for many mans and then search inside them?

So far I can only do this:

man ls | col -b | grep -i color
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    man apropos, apropos string Feb 21, 2014 at 5:57
  • You can try man -k . where the dot will mean any pattern. if you want to search for anything more specific you can specify it as man -k iscsiadm or any other pattern in place of iscsiadm.
    – zain27
    Feb 21, 2014 at 6:09
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    You should have looked at the manual page for man first ;). Apr 5, 2014 at 20:22

2 Answers 2

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Just turn to the man page of "man" itself, and search "search", and you will find:

man -k xxx

which searchs the short descriptions and manual page names, equivalent to apropos -r xxx.

man -K xxx

which searchs for text in all manual pages.

man -S, man -I, etc.

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The following command will list all the installed man pages in linux.

man -k .

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