man displays information from the on-line Programmer's Reference Manual. When invoked in the simplest (and for the new user the most helpful) way, i.e. without any options and with a topic, it displays the manual page which corresponds to the topic. Another helpful invokation of man is with the -k option followed by a keyword. This directs man to report the topics which are associated with the keyword. This is particularly helpful when the precise topic is unknown. For our purposes, the topic is usually a Unix command.
man [-k] topic
Note that the usage shown above is far from complete and is intended to show only the usages described in this document. For a complete usage list, type man man at the Unix prompt.
If you want to know what the Unix command ls will do, type man ls at the Unix prompt.
If you want to know if a Unix command exists which will list the files in a directory, type man -k list at the Unix prompt. Invoking man in this manner will usually result in more than one topic or Unix command associated with the keyword being reported. You must then decide which if any of the topics or Unix commands reported are appropriate to your needs. This can be done by invoking man topic for each topic or Unix command reported and reading its manual page. Or you could just ask a knowledgeable user.
To find out more about man, type man man at the Unix prompt.