What is the official 'man' location in the web?

Question

I had the following experience:

• ps command: how to know all the headers with their respective descriptions?

The answer is totally valid, the man available by the OS itself is not updated, so the web source is mandatory, but the reason of this question is that for example through the web exists other places about man, for example about the ps command:

• ps(1) from man7.org
• ps(1) - from linux.die.net

I assumed the info should be same, but it is not, in the former appears the STIME column/header but in the latter not. If my memory does not fail me, I remember other 2 places about man.

Note: I have no intention to be rude with the effort of the authors of any page about man. I respect his/her efforts, but I have this doubt and concern - because exists the scenario about to get trouble(s) if is used the documentation being not neither correct nor latest updated.

Question

• What is the official man location in the web?

Answer 1

There isn’t any single “official” man location on the web.

The single best source of information for you is the man pages available on your system. These will actually match the versions of the programs, interfaces etc. they document; this won’t be the case for man pages on the web (or rather, it will be up to you to figure out whether man pages on the web match your system). In some cases, your installed man pages will lack information; you might find other sources of information on your system (e.g. Info pages for GNU programs), or you might need to look at more recent man pages, or ask questions here.

As far as web pages reproducing man pages, there are a variety of them:

• some projects make their man pages available on the web themselves; for example, sudo;
• some distributions make the man pages they ship available on the web; for example, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD;
• a number of “aggregators” publish collections of man pages; this includes Michael Kerrisk’s man7.org, which is probably the most up-to-date as far as Linux documentation is concerned.

Note that in man7.org’s case, some of the man pages presented are aggregated from other projects, and some are the result of the man-pages project’s efforts. In particular, man7.org hosts the documentation for Linux system calls, so it is the canonical reference for those. However the web site publishes the latest released version of the man pages it presents, so they might document features which aren’t available on your system (for man pages from the man-pages project itself, this should be clear in each document).

For some variants of Unix or Linux, you won’t find man pages online. Apple for example used to host macOS man pages, but no longer does.