Manual Pages Archive Help

man.FreeBSD.org is the largest and oldest manual page archive on the internet.

Online continuously since 1996, it hosts manual pages from FreeBSD since its first release, version 1.0, and dozens of other operating systems and Unix variants - spanning decades of computing history, from 1970s Unix Seventh Edition and 2.11 BSD through every FreeBSD release, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and current releases of Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, and macOS.

Whether you're looking up a command on the system in front of you, comparing how a syscall's behavior changed across FreeBSD releases, or researching how Unix documentation evolved since the 1970s, this archive gives you direct, permanent links to the manual pages themselves.

The archive currently contains more than 560 operating-system releases and approximately 15 million manual pages. The complete archive occupies about 50 GB - individual downloadable tarballs are typically much smaller.

Shortcuts for FreeBSD manual pages

You can use these short URLs to search for FreeBSD man pages:

Output formats

Manual pages can be rendered in three formats: HTML (the default), plain ASCII text, or PDF. Choose a format from the drop-down on the query page, or select it directly in a URL with the "format" parameter.

Note that some operating systems only provide preformatted manual pages (catpages), e.g., older NetBSD and OpenBSD releases - for these, PDF output is not available.

Updates

The FreeBSD stable/NN, current, and Ports manual pages are updated every three months, usually around the time a new FreeBSD version is released.

Other operating system manual pages are updated as needed.

Notes

On small mobile devices, manual pages often look better in landscape mode than in portrait mode.

Troff macros work only if they are defined in FreeBSD's groff. OS-specific macros, such as "appeared in NetBSD version 1.2", are not supported.

See also

Release permalinks and tarballs

Release and release-alias permalinks show how to link to this script for the right OS version.

You may download the manual pages as a gzip'd tar archive for private or educational purposes. A tarball is normally 15-50 MB in size, but can be up to 350 MB for FreeBSD ports.

Release alias permalinks

Release aliases are short names that always point to the latest release of an operating system, e.g., "netbsd" links to the newest NetBSD release. Links using an alias stay valid when a new release comes out.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 1996-2026 Wolfram Schneider
Copyright (c) 1993-1995 Berkeley Software Design, Inc.

Copyright (c) for manual pages by OS vendors: 2.11 BSD, Apple, CentOS, Debian, Dell, DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP, IRIX, Minix, NetBSD, NeXTSTEP, OpenBSD, OpenIndiana, OpenSolaris, openSUSE, OSF, Plan 9, Red Hat, Rhapsody, Rocky, SunOS, SuSE, Ubuntu, ULTRIX, Unix Seventh Edition, X.Org, XFree86


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