14 Dec
2023
14 Dec
'23
3:10 a.m.
Somewhere between UNIX Release 3.0 and Release 4.1, a portion of the User's Manual
was split off into a separate Administrator's Manual, leading to a reordering of the
sections among other things. In the directories, these pieces would be placed in u_man
and a_man respectively.
There may be some evidence of the manual being intact as of 4.0 or at least not completely
separated. I've found consistently that references to manpages in the Documents for
UNIX Release 4.0 collection follow their pre-split numbering and all refer to the
User's Manual. The catch is that all references are to the UNIX User's Manual
Release 3.0, so this may not point conclusively to the state of /usr/man on disk at the
time. The Release 4.1 Administrator's Manual hasn't turned up yet but the
User's Manual reflects the renumbering and is less the a_man pages. To complete the
circle, the various Release 5.0 revisions of the documents do refer to the
Administrator's Manual where appropriate.
Was the manual getting split up of any great shock or was it to be expected as the
software grew? It would come to happen again between SysV and SVR2 with p_man. Out of
curiosity I checked how my own manpage set is organized, it seems to be of the research
order, with special files in section 4 rather than section 7 for instance. I've
never studied how far reaching the different orders are.
- Matt G.