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bobo
Asked: 2010-01-17 04:38:23 +0800 CST

What does the number inside the brackets mean in the output of whatis command in linux

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For example,

[root@fedora ~]# whatis pwd
pwd (1p) - return working directory name
pwd (1) - print name of current/working directory
pwd [builtins] (1) - bash built-in commands, see bash(1)
pwd.h [pwd] (0p) - password structure

What are those 0p,1,1p? Sometimes, I also see the word rpm in the brackets.

linux command-line-interface

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Man page sections. You can disambiguate which manual section you want by typing

    man 1 pwd

    For instance, say you typed 

    allhats2:~> whatis crontab
crontab (5)          - tables for driving cron
crontab (1)          - maintain crontab files for individual users (V3)

    And you wanted to see the entry about the structure of the tables, you could type

    man 5 crontab
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