The information provided by man is divided into different sections. Table 11 shows the different sections.
| 1 | Programs |
| 2 | System Calls |
| 3 | Library functions |
| 4 | Special Files |
| 5 | File Formats |
| 6 | Games |
| 7 | Miscellany section |
| 8 | Administration and privileged commands |
| 9 | Kernel reference |
Usually, section 3 is subdivided into different subsections, such as 3c for c libraries, 3x for x libraries, 3tk or 3tcl for tcl/tk, etc.
Sometimes, there is a program and a library function with the same name. To specify, which section to read, you can try one of the following commands (examples for the time c-function which is in section 3):
The information about a certain man section, for example the library section, can be obtained with man -3 intro.
If you would like to know in which sections a word appears, try either of the two equivalent commands:
Apropos is another command which searches for keywords in a short descriptions of commands. It is equivalent to make -k and can be useful in case you do not exactly know what you are looking for.