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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