What are man pages and how do you use them?

man command opens the manual page for a command — the authoritative reference for every option and behavior. Navigate with arrow keys or Page Up/Down, search with /pattern, and quit with q. Man pages are organized into sections: 1 (user commands), 2 (system calls), 3 (C library functions), 5 (file formats), 8 (sysadmin commands). Access a specific section with man 5 passwd. If you don't know the exact command name, use man -k keyword (or apropos keyword) to search descriptions. tldr command (from the tldr-pages project) offers practical examples as a quick alternative to the full man page.