How to follow links in linux man pages?

Question

Is there a way to follow the links mentioned in a man page? For example, here's the man page for ps; how do I access the link marked in red?

Answer 1

Man pages date back to Unix First Edition. While hypertext had been invented, it was still in infancy; the web was two decades away, and the manual was an actual printed book, often with one command per page if they fit (that's why they were called pages).

The format used for manual pages has evolved somewhat since then, but most pages aren't really designed for hypertext, and the default man program doesn't support it (it's just a plain text viewer, with hacks to support some basic formatting). There are however man page viewing programs that reconstruct some hyperlinks, mainly links to other man pages, which are traditionally written in the form man(1) where man is the name of the man page and 1 is the section number:

• tkman, a GUI man page viewer with hyperlinks
• WoMan, a man page browser for Emacs, supporting hyperlinks
• man2html, a man to HTML converter (plus a web browser to read the result)

You can browse the manual pages of several operating systems, converted to HTML by man2html or similar tools, on a number of sites online, for example:

• CentOS
• Debian
• FreeBSD (and a bunch of other collections)
• Mac OS X
• MINIX 3
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• Solaris 10, Solaris 11, other Solaris versions
• Ubuntu
• Unix 1st edition, Unix 6th edition, Unix 8th edition

Some time after man pages had become the established documentation format on unix and some time before the web was invented, the GNU project introduced the info documentation format, more advanced than man while sticking to simple markup designed for text terminals. The major innovation of info compared to man was to have multi-page documentation with hyperlinks to other pages. Info is still the prefered documentation format for GNU projects, though most Info pages are generated from a Texinfo source (or sometimes other formats) that can also generate HTML. When info documentation for a program exists, it's often the main manual, while the man pages only contain basic information about command line arguments.

Answer 2

First of all, it's not a link. It's just an underline. Man pages are just text documents with a little bit of simple formatting that a terminal can handle. The underline is just a highlight, there is no "link" involved.

The normal mange page reader is just a text formater. In fact it doesn't even display the text, it just formats it and sends it to another text display program to be shown on the screen (usually less). These programs have no concept of links.

There are some special documentation readers that might be able to look at formatting like that and make an educated guess that such a highlight might indicate that there is a related man page that could be pulled up and create a link, but I don't know which ones do. Perhaps pinfo?

If you want web like formatting with hyperlinks you can find almost any UNIX man page online with links added in. Try typing man [anything] into google and you will almost certainly get one in the first couple hits.

In the case of your example, the visual highlighting is a clue that that is another program name that has it's own man page that you can easily pull up. Try man 1 top. The 1 indicates the section of the man pages to look in. See this question for an explanation of the sections: What do the numbers in a man page mean?

Answer 3

This is very late reply but use w3mman. w3mman is the system’s manual pager by w3m.

http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/w3mman1.html

You can try it by installing w3m package. I believe this package is registered in the software repositories of most of major Linux/UNIX distributions and Cygwin.

Answer 4

Although w3mman is a solution to follow links, does not use all the screen (at least on ubuntu 12.10)

I prefer to use:

$ sudo su -
# apt-get install w3m man2html
# exit
$ alias man=' hman -P w3m'

add the last command to ~/.bash_aliases or similar startup script to get it on every session.

The -P w3m is because first browser to hman is lynx or sensible-browser but I prefer w3m

hman is a tool bundled on html2man. See this

If exit with confirmation is annoying to you, as to me is use this