What do the numbers in a man page mean?

Question

So, for example, when I type man ls I see LS(1). But if I type man apachectl I see APACHECTL(8) and if I type man cd I end up with cd(n).

I'm wondering what the significance of the numbers in the parentheses are, if they have any.

Answer 1

The number corresponds to what section of the manual that page is from; 1 is user commands, while 8 is sysadmin stuff. The man page for man itself (man man) explains it and lists the standard ones:

MANUAL SECTIONS
    The standard sections of the manual include:

    1      User Commands
    2      System Calls
    3      C Library Functions
    4      Devices and Special Files
    5      File Formats and Conventions
    6      Games et. Al.
    7      Miscellanea
    8      System Administration tools and Deamons

    Distributions customize the manual section to their specifics,
    which often include additional sections.

There are certain terms that have different pages in different sections (e.g. printf as a command appears in section 1, as a stdlib function appears in section 3); in cases like that you can pass the section number to man before the page name to choose which one you want, or use man -a to show every matching page in a row:

$ man 1 printf
$ man 3 printf
$ man -a printf

---

You can tell what sections a term falls in with man -k (equivalent to the apropos command). It will do substring matches too (e.g. it will show sprintf if you run man -k printf), so you need to use ^term to limit it:

$ man -k '^printf'
printf               (1)  - format and print data
printf               (1p)  - write formatted output
printf               (3)  - formatted output conversion
printf               (3p)  - print formatted output
printf [builtins]    (1)  - bash built-in commands, see bash(1)

Answer 2

The history of these section numbers goes back to the original Unix Programmer's Manual by Thompson and Ritchie in 1971.

The original sections were

1. Commands
2. System calls
3. Subroutines
4. Special files
5. File formats
6. User-maintained programs
7. Miscellaneous

Answer 3

What is's means already described, but I also wants to add that each section has special manual page with introduction: intro. For example, see man 1 intro or man 3 intro and so on.

Answer 4

From the man manpage:

The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the 
types of pages they contain.

   1   Executable programs or shell commands
   2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
   3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
   4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
   5   File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
   6   Games
   7   Miscellaneous  (including  macro  packages and conven‐
       tions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
   8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
   9   Kernel routines [Non standard]

As to why they're separate like that -- there's some overlap. Certain manpages exist in more than one section depending on what you mean.

For instance, compare man crontab with man 5 crontab -- chances are the latter is the one you meant to look up.

Answer 5

These are section numbers. Just type man man or open konqueror and type man://man and you'll see what are these sections.