Scope

It is assumed that all the base operating system's sets are installed, including base, comp, text, misc and share. Besides that, there are some rather interesting papers in the sources, which are expected to be unpacked under /usr/src.

As another side note on systems, most concepts and contents are not only present on NetBSD, but are also present on fellow BSD and other Unix systems. The papers available in the third part of this are special to the BSD world, but info pages can be found on all systems using GNU software, and man pages are THE documentation format found on all Unix systems used today.

Organisation

Traditionally, the Unix manuals came in print (dead-tree) version, and in an online readable form at the same time. The manuals were divided into several chapters, describing user commands, system calls, etc. Usually, one manual "page" describes one such command/call/whatever, even though the real description may be much longer than one physical page. To make it clear which section of the manual a certain page belongs to, the section is appended in parentheses right after the command etc. described, e.g. ls(1) tells the user that the 'ls' command is described in section 1 of the manual pages, open(2) is from section two, etc.

Manpage Sections

Now if one knows what sections there are, he can take an educated guess at where to start looking for documentation. In the BSD world, manual sections go from 1 to 9, and the topics they cover are described here.

1: General tools and utilities intended to be used by users.

Covers all the commands in your /bin and /usr/bin dirs such as text editors, command shell interpreters, searching and sorting tools, file manipulation commands system status commands, remote file copy commands, mail commands, compilers and compiler tools, formatted output tools, and line printer commands. 440 manual page entries.

2: System calls offered by the kernel.

You will find an overview of the system calls provided by NetBSD, the error codes they return together with their meaning, and a number of commonly used definitions and concepts like what a pathname is, distinction between real and effective user/group id, and some more. 188 manual page entries.

3: C library calls documentation.

NetBSD comes with a fair set of libraries for C programming, including the standard C library, the Curses screen library, math routines and many more that contain all sort of convenience functions. 1165 manual page entries.

4: Hardware, drivers and special files (devices).

This section contains man-pages for about all hardware drivers available on all NetBSD ports, including a description of the hardware they support, any flavours like different chipsets, and any flags available for tuning inside the kernel. Besides drivers, many of the "special" files like /dev/zero are described here. 471 manual page entries.

5: Binary and config file formats.

The manpages found here document every config file found in the /etc dir of NetBSD, as well as many other files and data structures like the ones found in filesystem and directory organisation, binary object and core files, and many more. Good for a reading to get a deeper understanding of how many things work in NetBSD even when you don't want to change anything! 106 manual page entries.

6: Games - now that's what we have all been waiting for!

Section 6 of the NetBSD manual pages describe the games found in /usr/games as well as the small utilities found there that help in factoring primes, predicting managerial behaviour and other common tasks. 46 manual page entries.

7: Miscellaneous information that didn't fit elsewhere.

There's always documentation that doesn't fit into any category, and in NetBSD this is put together in this section. Interesting items here are the hier(7) filesystem structure documentation, various manpages on how to write manpages, layout of a NetBSD release description, and some others. 25 manual page entries.

8: System maintenance and operation command

The system maintenance section documents things commonly found in /sbin, /usr/sbin and a few other places. Administrative concepts documented are user management, filesystem creation, maintenance and backup, setting up network services like ftp, rtadvd, NIS and many more. 429 manual page entries.

9: Internals for kernel hackers

The last section of the NetBSD manual covers functions and interfaces available inside the kernel. Among them are the bus space and bus dma framework, the pool allocator, packet filter interfaces, description of the various spl levels, callout, rnd, real time and virtual memory interfaces. All manpages in this section include code references into the live NetBSD source. 304 manual page entries.

Accessing the Manual

To access any of the manual pages, the "man" (manual) command is used. Give it the command, system call etc. you want documentation on, optionally preceded by the manual section if you know it. E.g. to get information on the man(1) command itself, type:

 $ man 1 man

If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, a simple keyword search is also available via the -k option of the man(1) command:

 $ man -k manual

It will tell you any manpages and their section that match that keyword, together with a short description of the manpage. An alternative invocation of "man -k" is the apropos(1) command.

To get a detailed description on any of the manpage section with more information like error codes and their reason, fundamental concepts of system programming, etc., there's an "intro" manpage for each section: intro(1), intro(2), etc. - be sure to have a look!

Last but not least, it should be mentioned that the manpages are stored under /usr/share/man in NetBSD.