What does bold text mean in the synopsis section of a man page?

The synopsis section of a man page is a short description of what a program does, written in a more friendly tone than the rest of the manual. It should be a summary of the most important information, covering the function of the program. It doesn’t need to be an in-depth description, but it should describe the program’s main purpose and what users can expect from it.

What does bold text mean in man page text?

The text in a man page is normally written in a fixed-width font However, when a keyword appears in the synopsis section of the man page, it will be displayed in bold. This keyword is usually the name of the sub-command. For example, the keyword in the synopsis section of the man page for sudo will be “sudo”.

What does bold text mean in the synopsis section of man page?

The synopsis section of a man page is a short summary of what the entire page is about. It’s not a full section of text; it’s just a few lines. The synopsis is used to quickly describe the program itself and should be written in a way that makes the most sense to the end-user.

What does it mean to make text bold in man pages?

The important thing to understand is that this is not bold text as in a word processing program. The man pages use a restricted set of characters to represent bold text. This restricted set of characters is defined in the system locale (see What is your locale?) and will vary depending on your system. If you try to bold text in a man page you'll see that it will look strange.

What does it mean bold text in man pages?

In the synopsis section, the most noticeable change in formatting is the use of bold text. The use of bold text in synopsis sections is often employed to draw the attention of the reader to important information. If a keyword appears in the synopsis section of a man page, it will be rendered in bold text.