How do I look up man page references with round brackets?

Question

I have seen How do I look up man page references with square brackets?. The questioner gives the example of gittutorial(7) and being able to access it by man 7 gittutorial.

When I look at man regex, the top line has:

REGEX(7)                   Linux Programmer's Manual                  REGEX(7)

Now this man page is too difficult for me, so when I see:

AUTHOR
       This page was taken from Henry Spencer's regex package.

SEE ALSO
       grep(1), regex(3)

       POSIX.2, section 2.8 (Regular Expression Notation).

I try man 3 regex but that gives me:

[06:46 PM] ~ $ man 3 regex
No manual entry for regex in section 3
[06:46 PM] ~ $

What is the correct way to access regex(3)?

man 7 regex works for regex(7), man 4 tty works for tty(4) and man 8 updatedb works for updatedb(8).

Do you have the `manpages-posix-dev` package installed? – ergysdo Nov 06 '13 at 13:37 — ergysdo, Nov 06 '13 at 13:37

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

0

"man 3 regex" is the correct command and it works fine for me. Probably, you don't have installed the necessary packages that provide the manpage. Visit this page for more details.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

Community

1

answered Nov 06 '13 at 13:41

staxyz

101
1

Thanks for the U&L link! [I guess this is because they take up about 20 MB, and some users don't need them](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/12707/15760) makes sense. – Nov 06 '13 at 13:59

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 06 '13 at 13:47

0

The manpage of regex in section 3 in not present on your system.

To find out which package this file contains type use apt-file. You need to install it first and then update the local cache:

user@host:~# apt-get install apt-file
user@host:~# apt-file update

Then search the cache with:

user@host:~# apt-file search /usr/share/man/man3/regex.3.gz
manpages-dev: /usr/share/man/man3/regex.3.gz

So you see which packages you can install: manpages-dev:

user@host:~# apt-get install manpages-dev

After installation man 3 regex should work.

answered Nov 06 '13 at 13:47

chaos

27,106
12
74
77

I do have `/usr/share/man/man3` with quite a few .gz files in there. But `regex.3.gz` isn't there as you point out. I'm not keen on installing it. There are easier reads on `regex` available but now I know why I don't have `regex(3)` :) – Nov 06 '13 at 13:59
Yeah google man 3 regex and you're in, but I thought it's better to know how to get them or find out where they are... =) – chaos Nov 06 '13 at 14:22

How do I look up man page references with round brackets?

2 Answers2