View a man page in a specific section

Question

I wanted to access man pages for command chmod.

Command whatis chmod gave this output:

chmod (2) - change permissions of a file chmod (1) - change file mode bits

But I was actually looking for chmod(2).

When I type man chmod, man pages for chmod(1) appears.

Both man chmod(2) and man 'chmod(2)' commands show error.

I tried running info coreutils 'chmod invocation', but output is some kind of documentation which doesn't look like a typical man page.

Solution

Type: man 2 chmod, or man -a chmod to get all the versions.

Note: man -a chmod may be useful on some systems, because there may be other man pages on the same function, which may give additional information. For instance, under Debian, if the manpages-posix-dev package is installed, there's also the chmod(3posix) man page, also accessible via man 3 chmod.