If you open a man page on a *NIX system (such as a Linux distro), you'll always see a number next to the subject of the man page. Like GIT(1), SUDO(8) or open(n). What's that thing in parentheses? To cut a long story short, it's the section the man page belongs to. Let's discover what that means.

man pages are divided into sections

man pages act as a system reference manual on any *NIX system. All man pages have a heading containing the name of the page, its section and a very short description. Something like this.

<name>(<#section>)     <description>     <name>(<#section>)

As a concrete example, here's the first line you get if you execute man git.

GIT(1)                         Git Manual                        GIT(1)

The name is self-explanatory, is is the short description, but the section number is not so transparent in its meaning. To find out what it means, we can actually consult the man page for the man program itself.

$ man man
MAN(1)                     Manual pager utils                    MAN(1)
[...]
The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed
by the types of pages they contain.

1   Executable programs or shell commands
2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
5   File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
6   Games
7   Miscellaneous (including macro  packages  and  conventions),
    e.g. man(7), groff(7), man-pages(7)
8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
9   Kernel routines [Non standard]
[...]

This sectioning makes it possible to have multiple man pages with the same name, but in different sections. By default, you'll get only one result when executing man <name>, and which one you get is dependent on a pre-defined search order. Which, of course, we can also find in the man page for man.

The  order  of sections to search may be overridden by the envi‐
ronment  variable  $MANSECT  or  by  the  SECTION  directive  in
/etc/man_db.conf.  By default it is as follows:

      1 1p n l 8 3 3p 0 0p 2 3type 5 4 9 6 7

In my personal experience, the default search order most often gives you what you want. But sometimes it doesn't, and then you need to figure out how to find the man page you're after.

Selecting man pages from different sections

To select a page from a particular section, you specify the section before the name. For example, as indicated by the excerpt from MAN(1) above, there's also a man(7). We can get it like so.

$ man 7 man
man(7)              Miscellaneous Information Manual             man(7)
[...]

But what if you don't actually know which section the man page you're looking for is in, you only know that the one you're looking at isn't the one? Then you can use whatis. For example, I have four different man pages named open on my machine.

$ whatis open
open (2)             - open and possibly create a file
open (3p)            - open file
open (3perl)         - perl pragma to set default PerlIO layers for input and output
open (n)             - Open a file-based or command pipeline channel

Here you can also see a couple of section numbers that look a bit different, namely 3perl and n. These don't belong to any of the standard sections, but you can open them just the same. For example, man 3perl open would open the open page from the custom 3perl section.

Note: If you don't see all available man pages when running whatis for a particular page, your man database is out-of-date, you may want to run mandb manually (or whatever is equivalent on your system) to rebuild the search index.

And that's all!

Now you should hopefully be a bit more confident in finding the man page you're looking for. And if at any point you forget what I've written here, almost all of the information is available just a man man away!