On Ubuntu 18.04, the following commands do not turn up any man pages:

man 2 creat
man 2 ioctl
man 2 chown

There are plenty of other examples, but these illustrate the point.

I tried a bit of apt search and online searching as well, but didn't turn up any clear answer for which package(s) to install to get these and other similar man pages.

How can I install the system call man pages on Ubuntu 18.04?

1 Answer

The manpages-dev package provides most manpages in section 2 of the manual (documenting system calls), including those for the creat, ioctl and chown system calls.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install manpages-dev

You can usually find the packages that provide manpages by searching the Ubuntu packages database for a file named like creat.2.gz, where (if different) creat is replaced by the name and 2 is replaced by the section number.

Packages providing manpages in some languages other than English also exist and can also usually be found in this way. For example, if you wanted the section 2 manual pages in French, you would install the manpages-fr-dev package.

1

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