On Sat, Oct 02, 2021 at 07:23:45AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Friday 01 October 2021 22:52:59 David Wright wrote: > > Like others, I tried to guess what Gene really wanted (I can barely > > believe the answer) and to come up with a suitable method. I also > > tried out others' suggestions. We don't know what the mysterious > > man 9 actually is (unless there's a well-known command named "9"), > > so I used man man and man bash¹. > > There is a well known man 9 command, it means to save man the trouble of > searching the whole database, as there might be duplicate names to > confuse the issue, but it this case look in man/man9 for the requested > manpage. Sheesh, doesn't anyone read manpages anymore? :o) > [...]
In Debian's man command, if there are two arguments given, the first argument is the section name, and the second argument is the page name. E.g. if you run "man 8 intro", you will read the intro(8) page, which is the introduction to section 8 of the manual. Debian mostly ships pages in sections 1 through 8, but some packages or applications may create other sections. E.g. the manpages-posix package in Debian creates a section called "1posix". Perl puts some man pages in section "3perl", Tcl puts its man pages in section "n", and so on. Apparently Gene's application has some documentation in section "9". This is also not unheard of. According to Google, at some point in the past, the Linux kernel shipped some kernel-internal stuff in section 9, and Solaris also has kernel stuff in sections 9e, 9f and 9s.
