# Making man Pages



## CodeBlock (Aug 28, 2009)

What's needed to make a man page? How complicated is it? I've searched but only found a few (crappy) tutorials on this. Anyone care to shed some light?


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## rbelk (Aug 28, 2009)

You actually use the nroff utility, it's in the base install. A good introduction on how to create a man page with nroff is located at Chapter 39: Creating and Formatting Man Pages.

Even though it looks hard, it's really not. Just start off with the basic examples and experiment, be sure to make backups. 

A side note, the question "How do I make a man page?" is asked more than what most people think it does.

Side note two, one of the best UNIX sites on the net is www.unix.com. Visit and learn from the masters. :e


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## graudeejs (Aug 28, 2009)

Making man page isn't all that hard...., the only thing that can confuse, is how many formats there are out there.

I suggest reading man(7)
Then pick some manual page, that you like, cp to home, uncompress and view with vim
and start writing your own man page...
This is how I did it

here's one of my man pages
http://code.google.com/p/playd/source/browse/trunk/playd2/man/man1/playd.1


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## CodeBlock (Aug 28, 2009)

Alright guys, thanks both for the info!


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## f-andrey (Sep 2, 2009)

Very interesting report
K. Dzonsons, Deprecating groff for BSD manual display


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