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For most commands that I have seen, there are some underlined words in their man page. What is the meaning of this underline? Is that a link? If yes, how we can go there?

Gaurang Tandon
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Mohammad Reza Rezwani
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    ["The underline is just a highlight, there is no "link" involved.

    The normal man page reader is just a text formater. In fact man doesn't even display the text, man just formats it and sends it to another text display program to be shown on the screen (usually less). These programs have no concept of links."](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/18151/how-to-follow-links-in-linux-man-pages)

     – Trevor Boyd Smith Feb 20 '18 at 13:49

3 Answers3

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Most underlined words in man pages are for emphasis. Its is not a hyperlink .

nux
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also from man man page

   italic text        replace with appropriate argument.
   [-abc]             any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
   -a|-b              options delimited by | cannot be used together.

   argument ...       argument is repeatable.
   [expression] ...   entire expression within [ ] is repeatable.

   Exact rendering may vary depending on the output device.  For instance,
   man will usually not be able to render italics when running in a termi‐
   nal, and will typically use underlined or coloured text instead.
Mohammad Reza Rezwani
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0

Italics (emphasis; as clearly answered above, they are usually displayed underlined, unfortunately) are used in several sections of a manual page for different purposes.

In the synopsis, boldface is used for as-is text and italics are used to
indicate  replaceable  arguments.

For  manual  pages  that describe a command (typically in Sections 1 and 8),
the arguments are always specified using italics, even in the SYNOPSIS section.


For manual pages that describe functions (typically in Sections 2  and  3),
the arguments  are  always  specified  using  italics, even in the SYNOPSIS section,
where the rest of the function is specified in bold:


   int myfunction(int argc, char **argv);




Variable names should, like argument names, be specified in italics.

General formatting conventions:

If  the  command is short, then it can be included inline in the text, in italic
format, for example, man 7 man-pages.  In this case, it may be worth using  non‐
breaking  spaces  ("\ ")  at  suitable  places  in the command.  Command options
should be written in italics (e.g., -l).

Expressions, if not written on a separate indented line, should be specified  in
italics.  Again, the use of nonbreaking spaces may be appropriate if the expres‐
sion is inlined with normal text.

Consult man-pages(7) for more details.

Yaroslav Nikitenko
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