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Unix manual pages are gathered into several sections. A section is related to a given topic:
- section 1: user commands that may be started by everyone
- section 2: system calls, that is, functions provided by the kernel
- section 3: subroutines, that is, library functions
- section 4: devices (files in /dev)
- section 5: file format descriptions, e.g. /etc/passwd
- section 6: games
- section 7: miscellaneous
- section 8: system administration tools that only root can execute
- section 9: another (Linux specific) place for kernel routine documentation
- section l: (deprecated) new documentation, that may be moved to a more appropriate section
- section n: (deprecated) old documentation, that may be kept for a grace period
- section o: (deprecated) local documentation referring to this particular system
As two different sections can contain two man pages with the same name, we note manuals as follows: man_page(section). Therefore, crontab(5) identifies the crontab manual from the section 5 (to be opposed to crontab(1)).
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