How do you discover system builtins for C functions? The man pages for the C functions on Linux are great, but only if you know the name of the function. Is there a way to see a detailed table of contents, or to browse Manpages on a Linux distro?
ls /usr/share/man/man?/*will show you all the man pages on your system. I used to pick ones at random.Originally there were a number of manuals. Manual 1 had user commands. Manual 2 had system calls. Etc. You can type
man NUMBER introto read about that manual. You can also useman -korapproposbut I've also just used grep. These days they're compressed so zgrep.man -k xyzwill search for any man page withxyzin it. You can also doman stdioto see what's in the stdio library.There's also
aproposwhich does the same thing but for some reason is easier for me to remember.
On Archlinux at least, the glibc package includes info pages for C functions. Just type info libc at the command line, or use info inside emacs. There are hyperlinks in info pages, it's a nicer interface than man pages.
On Debian, there is a package that displays system documentation including, if I remember correctly, man pages. I think I had to set up a local web server first.
