Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
by thunderbong on 4/6/2026, 9:39:17 AM
https://lalitm.com/til-number-in-man-page-titles-e-g-sleep-3/
Comments
by: mjlee
If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at <a href="https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030" rel="nofollow">https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...</a><p>(discussed at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194</a>)
4/6/2026, 11:10:11 AM
by: gerikson
> (... less common section numbers)<p>One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.
4/6/2026, 11:16:46 AM
by: chasil
The POSIX standard manual pages for the utilities can be found here:<p><a href="https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.html" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.htm...</a><p>These would all be in section 1, if I am correct.
4/6/2026, 12:09:58 PM
by: PhilipRoman
Interestingly, the section doesn't actually have to start with a number. TCL man pages use the 'n' section and 'man' resolves them just fine despite the ambiguity. Conversely, manpage names can also start with numbers, although this is rare (I found only one such example: man 30-systemd-environment-d-generator)
4/6/2026, 11:50:36 AM
by: kykat
I looked up what the numbers mean a couple of times, but always forget it immediately
4/6/2026, 11:07:00 AM
by: LtWorf
Step 1: Read `man man`<p>Step 2: Feel the urge to write an article about that
4/6/2026, 10:42:49 AM
by: amelius
Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs.<p>Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.
4/6/2026, 11:05:16 AM