Why do programs in Unix-like environments have numbers after their name? [duplicate]
Question
This question already has an answer here:
For example, when I run man ioctl
the page says IOCTL(2)
at the top. What does that mean? Is there an IOCTL(1)
? And how does one navigate between these?
Solution
It's the man page section. From memory, section 1 is user programs, 2 is system calls, and 3 is standard C library calls, and 5 is file formats.
Wikipedia has the full explanation here.
OTHER TIPS
That's the man page section number. For example
man printf
(should) Give you section 1, printf
the bash command, while
man 3 printf
gives you the C function printf
.
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