Man Page Mysteries
A New Day, Something New to Learn!!!
I am having a headache learning to use signal processing correctly with the Shell Lab, but it’s a nice exercise.
Aside from what I learned there, the interesting stuff happened with man pages!
I was referring to my local man pages since, for some reason, the man command was taking longer to exit on the server I was working on.
I got so confused by the difference in the details that I found on my local macOS compared to the Linux box that threw me off for a while. I thought I was not searching the right commands anymore.
After resolving all the bugs (God knows how!), I opened the man page again on the server, and lo and behold, the man pages are different.
macOS has System Call Manuals for man waitpid, and it’s Linux's Programmers Manual on the Linux box. I was writing the program on Linux and was dealing with system calls, so I needed the
man pages from Linux. Never had I imagined that man pages can be different. But, in retrospect, it makes sense that they would be different.
While on this voyage, I realized what the number argument in the man pages means. It refers to the section in which we need the man page for.
Look into the reference for more details: