How to escape out of the MAN screen or page in UNIX?

Question

I entered man ls. This shows a screen with the manual for ls. I want to close this manual and go back to the previous screen. How do I do it ? The man page for ls is not allowing me to do so. It keeps on showing "(END)" or some message when I try to type a unix command.

I am a newbie so please don't downvote me.

Solution 1

The man command uses your default pager, which is specified by $MANPAGER if it's set, or by $PAGER. If neither is set, it defaults to something reasonable, probably either more or less. (Oddly, I don't see this in the man page for the man command, which you can view by typing man man -- once you get back to your shell prompt.)

Most pagers can be exited by typing q -- which is going to be a useful thing to know for other programs that invoke your pager, or when you use your pager directly to view a file (less some-file.txt).

When I run the man command on my system, the bottom line shows:

Manual page ls(1) line 1 (press h for help or q to quit)

in reverse video. Do you see that? (You may or may not, depending on your settings.)

If your pager is less, then you can get more information by typing h for help -- or by typing man less.

Solution 2

You can press the q key to exit the man pages.

---

FYI:

In my experience, the man generally uses less to display the information. To get a helpful list of keyboard shortcuts (navigation, exiting) for less (and for man), you can type in:

less --help

Here is a brief exerpt:

                   SUMMARY OF LESS COMMANDS

      Commands marked with * may be preceded by a number, N.
      Notes in parentheses indicate the behavior if N is given.

  h  H                 Display this help.
  q  :q  Q  :Q  ZZ     Exit.
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

                           MOVING

  e  ^E  j  ^N  CR  *  Forward  one line   (or N lines).
  y  ^Y  k  ^K  ^P  *  Backward one line   (or N lines).
  f  ^F  ^V  SPACE  *  Forward  one window (or N lines).
  b  ^B  ESC-v      *  Backward one window (or N lines).
  z                 *  Forward  one window (and set window to N).
  w                 *  Backward one window (and set window to N).
  ESC-SPACE         *  Forward  one window, but don't stop at end-of-file.
  d  ^D             *  Forward  one half-window (and set half-window to N).
  u  ^U             *  Backward one half-window (and set half-window to N).
  ESC-)  RightArrow *  Left  one half screen width (or N positions).
  ESC-(  LeftArrow  *  Right one half screen width (or N positions).
  F                    Forward forever; like "tail -f".
  r  ^R  ^L            Repaint screen.
  R                    Repaint screen, discarding buffered input.
        ---------------------------------------------------
        Default "window" is the screen height.
        Default "half-window" is half of the screen height.

Comments

[bashboy]

How did you come to know that ? Is it mentioned somewhere in a man page ?

[bashboy]

Hi ! I have some questions. What is a pager ? You said that most pagers can be exited by q. Is there any other key to exit the unusual pagers ? Also, is there a way to change exit key from q to "zzz" or esc key ?

[bashboy]

I don't see - Manual page ls(1) line 1 (press h for help or q to quit). Also, I am not able to copy the entire text of man page. I was thinking of searching your line after copying the text onto windows word.

[Keith Thompson]

@bashboy: A pager is a program that lets you view a text file. Older ones could only show a file one page at a time, thus the name; modern pagers let you scroll a line or half-page at a time, and to go forward and backward. less is configurable; man less for details. But you might consider just sticking with the defaults until you're more familiar with the system.

[user1934428]

@KeithThompson : My cygwin man-page for man states for the case of neither MANPAGER nor PAGER being set: By default, less is used, falling back to cat if less is not found or is not executable.

[user1934428]

@bashboy : If you want to experiment with warious pagers, before setting it as environment variable, you can use the option -P to specify your own pager, for instance to show the man-page for ls using the most-pager, you could try this with ` man -P most ls` (provided, of course, that most is in your PATH).