Navigate the man pages

created in February 2022, last update in February 2023

I often need to look up commands and their respective options. Normally, I would google my question. Let me give three recent examples from this morning:

"How to set path with wget"
"What is the d option in unzip?"
"adduser gecos"

Eventually I will find a post on stackoverflow or another stackexchange website that delivers good answers. One of these answers has changed my behaviour. I knew about the man pages, but I have found it always rather cumbersome to skim through the man pages. I now learned how it can actually be easy to navigate the man pages.

As "Radu Rădeanu" answered in 2014, type /<word> to highlight every "word" in the man page, and press n to go to the next occurence. That's a really nice feature of the man page, and I think it's worth investing more time into getting man page behaviours straight. Thank you, Radu!

/word -> search "word" after the cursor
?word -> search "word" before the cursor
n -> Go to next occurence of word
N -> Go to previous occurence of word
d -> Go downwards half a page
u -> Go upwards half a page

If you search an option like -s, you will find it really difficult to find the description of your command. You can try it in man curl: You will find way too many highlights and be ineffective in your search.

In that case, you can use a regex / regular expression:

# search for -s; . -> any number; * -> any character; --
/-s.*--

man cp # open the manual page for the cp command
/-d # search "-d" inside the man page
n # go to the next occurence of "-d"
n # ...
N # go to previous occurence of "-d"
?-r # Look for occurences of "-r" before the cursor