A man page (short for manual page) is online software documentation, serving as content for the man system, for an entity typically encountered in Unix or a Unix-like operating system. Such entities include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts. A user may invoke a man page by issuing the man command.

To read a manual page for a Unix command, one can use

<source lang="bash"> man <command_name> </source>

at a shell prompt: for example, "man ftp". In order to simplify navigation through the output, man generally uses the less terminal pager.

Pages are traditionally referred to using the notation "name(section)": for example, ftp(1). The same page name may appear in more than one section of the manual, as when the names of system calls, user commands, or macro packages coincide. Examples are man(1) and man(7), or exit(2) and exit(3).

The syntax for accessing the non-default manual section varies between different man implementations. On Solaris, for example, the syntax for reading printf(3) is: <source lang="bash"> man -s 3c printf </source> On Linux and BSD derivatives the same invocation would be: <source lang="bash"> man 3 printf </source>