About

Where the pages come from

Every page here is the real manual page from Debian stable, unpacked from the distribution's own binary packages. That matters: the df page on a Mac is the BSD one and documents different flags from the GNU df that a Linux machine actually runs.

The corpus is 4,355 pages from 68 packages. It covers the Linux man-pages project — the system calls and library functions of sections 2, 3 and 7 — together with the GNU and systemd tools people reach for daily.

How the option tables are built

A manual page hides its flags inside prose. Finding one means reading the whole DESCRIPTION, and curl documents 269 of them that way.

Each page is rendered with mandoc and the flag definitions are mined out of the result, then shown as a list you can filter. Four different conventions appear across the corpus — the tagged lists of GNU tools, the indented blocks of systemd, the plain-text flags of git, and the hanging paragraphs that help2man emits — and all four are read. That yields 13,828 options across 824 pages.

The filter matches the description as well as the flag, so searching size on df finds --block-size without you knowing its name.

What is changed, and what is not

The words of each page are left alone. Nothing is rewritten, summarised, or generated. What this site adds is typesetting: a readable measure, real monospace for anything you would type, and the options lifted out into a table.

Where the option table is shown, the original OPTIONS section is not repeated below it, because the table holds the same rows. Every other section of the page is present in full.

Licence

Each manual page carries its own copyright and licence, held by its own authors. This site reproduces them and claims nothing over them. The typesetting and the option extraction are the only parts that are ours.