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I’m trying to write some specifications to be shared between a small team and getting picky about the format I put some command listings in. Is there any formal definition of the syntax used in the SYNOPSIS section of man pages?
From the Wikimedia Commons, here’s an example of a man page with the SYNOPSIS section I’m talking about, where the command is listed with the required and optional arguments it understands.
There is no formal definition of a manpage anywhere, not even in the POSIX standard. The
man(1)manpage in your example is pretty typical: you write out the various ways a program can be used (often just one) with[]denoting optional, bold (or typewriter font with themdocmacros) denoting literal command line input and italics denoting variables.The manpages
man(7)andmdoc(7)will explain the most important conventions.man(7)is for old-style Unix manpages and is still popular on Linux (seeman-pages(7));mdoc(7)comes from 4.4BSD and is popular in its derivatives. The latter maintains a stricter separation of content and presentation and can produce (IMHO) prettier PDF/HTML output