How can I search within a manpage?

Question

Is there a option to search within manpages?

Answer 1

Just hit /, and type your search pattern.

• Patterns can be regular expressions, for example, you could search for the word "option" by typing

  /[Oo]ption
  

  Or find all of the long arguments with

  /(--)[a-Z]
  

  To cancel the search, hit Ctrl+C.

  Some useful quantification operators are:

  ?    for zero or one of the preceding expression
  *    for zero or more of the preceding expression
  +    for one or more of the preceding expression
  

  And expressions can be "grouped" with parentheses, as in (--)+ (for two or more dashes).

  [a-Z] is a sequence (others include [0-9], [a-z] and so on), they can be combined, as in [a-Z0-9]. You can also invert expressions with the ^ operator, e.g. (--)[^a-Z]+ for all long arguments that start with anything other than a letter.

  Another useful operation is Union (|), as in color|colour, which finds every occurrence of either color or colour (this is sometimes called boolean OR).

• To jump through the results, press N (forwards) and Shift+N (backwards).

• There is also a way to search across all manpages:

  man -K "Hello World"
  

  The man program will open the first match, and after you close it with q, offer you to

  • view the next one (Return)
  • skip the current one (Ctrl+D)
  • or exit (Ctrl+C).