How to jump to a specific heading in a man page?

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From the command line for GNU man:

man --pager="less -p ^ENVIRONMENT" man

or for BSD man:

man -P 'less -p ^ENVIRONMENT' man

will jump to the “ENVIRONMENT” heading of the man page for man.

Here is a handy function:

mans () {    # Bash
    local pages string
    if [[ -n $2 ]]
    then
        pages=(${@:2})
        string="$1"
    else
        pages=$1
    fi
    # GNU man
    man ${2:+--pager="less -p \"$string\" -G"} ${pages[@]}
    # BSD man
    # man ${2:+-P "less -p \"$string\" -G"} ${pages[@]}
}

Examples:

Use normally:

mans bash

Go to the “DESCRIPTION” heading:

mans ^DESCRIPTION bash

Go to the “DESCRIPTION” heading of each man page in succession (press q and Enter to go to the next one):

mans ^DESCRIPTION bash ksh zsh

Go to the “Parameter Expansion” sub-heading (you can search for any string using regular expressions):

mans '^ *Parameter Expansion' bash

Search for the most recent regex you’ve used in Less:

mans '' bash

The match that you searched for won’t be highlighted. If you’d prefer it to be, just remove the -G from the options to less.

This function makes no attempt to handle the other arguments and options that man supports.

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