Notation (for man(1) ) and UNIX man pages Updated: 11/13/2000 1:30PM From time to time, you will see references (in this document and other UNIX documentation): See shutdown(1M) . This refers to a UNIX online manual page ("manpages") for the command known as shutdown . Because UNIX man pages are divided into numbered sections1, the number in the parentheses refer to the specific section. This removes ambiguity between entries of different sections with the same name. For instance, if in HPUX, you type in: man shutdown , you will receive the section 2 man page about shutting down a network socket. If you wanted the man page about shutting down a UNIX server, you would type: man 1m shutdown . (And to be explicit about wanting to read the section 2 version of shutdown mentioned earlier, you'd type man 2 shutdown .) 1 Generally, section 1 is for commands, section 2 is for system calls (provided by UNIX), ... , section 1M is for commands that do special maintenance (like shutting down a machine). Man page sections vary slightly from vendor to vendor, and if you wanted to know the different man page sections on your UNIX system, you can type in "man 1 intro", "man 2 intro" , ... and so on to get the introductory man page for each section. There are the typical sections in a UNIX man page: NAME: the name of the command SYNOPSIS: the command with all the options listed DESCRIPTION: short description of the command and a description of all its options EXAMPLES: examples FILES: all files related to this command WARNINGS: bugs and other gotchas SEE ALSO: related man pages.