Step 1: Read `man man`

Step 2: Feel the urge to write an article about that

Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs.

Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.

I looked up what the numbers mean a couple of times, but always forget it immediately

If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)

> (... less common section numbers)

One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.

Interestingly, the section doesn't actually have to start with a number. TCL man pages use the 'n' section and 'man' resolves them just fine despite the ambiguity. Conversely, manpage names can also start with numbers, although this is rare (I found only one such example: man 30-systemd-environment-d-generator)

The POSIX standard manual pages for the utilities can be found here:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.htm...

These would all be in section 1, if I am correct.