manpage

I'm trying to write some specifications to be shared between a small team and getting picky about the format I put some command listings in. Is there any formal definition of the syntax used in the SYNOPSIS section of man pages? From the Wikimedia Commons, here's an example of a man page with the SYNOPSIS section I'm talking about, where the command is listed with the required and optional arguments it understands. There is no formal definition of a manpage anywhere, not even in the POSIX standard. The man(1) manpage in your example is pretty typical: you write out the various ways a program

How do I set an environment variable in C++? They do not need to persist past program execution They only need to be visible in the current process Preference for platform independent but for my problem only needs to work on Win32/64 Thanks alamar NAME putenv - change or add an environment variable SYNOPSIS #include &ltstdlib.h> int putenv(char *string); DESCRIPTION The putenv() function adds or changes the value of environment variables. The argument string is of the form name=value. If name does not already exist in the environment, then string is added to the environment. If name does exist

In man pages I come across various syntaxes to write Linux/Unix commands, which include square brackets, angular brackets, hyphens ( - ) and double hyphens ( -- ) in various combinations. Does anyone know the meaning of these syntax conventions? [ ] < > [< >] [--] - -- [< >...] Avi Square Brackets [ ] The square brackets ( [ ] ) indicate that the enclosed element (parameter, value, or information) is optional. You can choose one or more items or no items. Do not type the square brackets themselves in the command line. Example: [global options], [source arguments], [destination arguments] Angle

There are multiple sections in the manpages. Two of them are: 2 Unix and C system calls 3 C Library routines for C programs For example there is getmntinfo(3) and getfsstat(2) , both look like they do the same thing. When should one use which and what is the difference? System calls are operating system functions, like on UNIX, the malloc() function is built on top of the sbrk() system call (for resizing process memory space). Libraries are just application code that's not part of the operating system and will often be available on more than one OS. They're basically the same as function calls

Does documentation for C++ exist in Linux? I want something like the man pages of C. For example, docs for string, stl, iostream, ifstream, etc.? Matteo Italia If you use the "normal" libstdc++ shipped with g++, its documentation is available online here . Most Linux distributions make it also available offline as a particular package; for Debian-derived distros, for example, it's libstdc++-6-<version>-doc (e.g. on my Ubuntu machine I have libstdc++-6-4.4-doc installed). In general the documentation will be put somewhere like /usr/share/doc/libstdc++-6-4.4-doc . This about implementation