UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [15]
Solaris now uses SGML as the formatting language for most man pages instead of the traditional troff. Man pages in troff format are still supported, but they are kept in separate directories.
man: read manual pages
man title formats a specific manual page and sends it to your terminal via more (or whatever program is specified in your PAGER environment variable). title is usually a command, device, or filename. The sections of the manual are searched in roughly numeric order, although sections that describe commands (sections 1, 8, and 6) are usually searched first.
The form man section title gets you a man page from a particular section. Thus, man tty gets you the man page for the tty command and man 4 tty gets you the man page for the serial driver.
Under Solaris, you must preface the section number with the -s flag, for example, man -s 4 tty.
Almost all versions of man check to see if you have defined the MANPATH environment variable, which should contain a colon-separated list of directories if it exists. MANPATH overrides or extends the list of directories that man searches. For example, the command
setenv MANPATH /home/share/localman:/usr/share/man
in your .login file would cause man to search a hierarchy of local man pages before /usr/man. The sh version would be
MANPATH=/home/share/localman:/usr/share/man
export MANPATH
On some systems, MANPATH completely overrides the default search path, so you must explicitly include the default directory if you want to continue to see your vendor’s man pages.
man -k keyword prints a list of man pages that have keyword in their one-line synopses. For example:
% man -k translate
gftype (1L) - translate a font file for humans to read
pktype (1L) - translate a packed font file
tr (1) - translate characters
The keywords database is normally kept in a file called whatis in the root of the man page hierarchy (/usr/man or /usr/share/man). If you add additional man pages to your system, you may need to rebuild this file with catman -w.
1.6 ESSENTIAL TASKS OF THE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR
The sections below give an overview of some tasks that system administrators are typically expected to perform. These duties need not necessarily be performed by one person, and at many sites the work is distributed among several people. However, there does need to be at least one person who understands all of the chores and makes sure that someone is doing them.
Adding and removing users
The system administrator adds accounts for new users and removes the accounts of users that are no longer active. The process of adding and removing users can be automated, but certain administrative decisions (where to put the user’s home directory, on which machines to create the account, etc.) must still be made before a new user can be added.
See Chapter 6 for more information about adding new users.
When a user should no longer have access to the system, the user’s account must be disabled. All of the files owned by the account must be backed up to tape and disposed of so that the system does not accumulate unwanted baggage over time.
Adding and removing hardware
When new hardware is purchased or when hardware is moved from one machine to another, the system must be configured to recognize and use that hardware. Hardware-support chores can range from the simple task of adding a printer to the more complex job of adding a disk drive.
See Chapters 8, 12, and 23 for more information about these topics.
Performing backups
Performing backups is perhaps the most important job of the system administrator, and it is also the job that is most often ignored or sloppily done. Backups are time-consuming and boring, but they are absolutely necessary. Backups can be automated and delegated to an underling, but it