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Comment by timw4mail | Hacker News Reader

What does the (8) mean?

It's one of these mystery numbers:

    $ man printf
    [goddammit you stupid computer]
    $ man 3 printf

Hey, not the computer's fault that you didn't remember to ask for libc instead of the shell command:) (Although I kinda like whatever SUSE did to make it interactive prompt whenever the manual section is ambiguous)

It references the BSD manual section where you can find the documentation.

1 General commands

2 Syscalls

3 Library functions

4 Kernel interfaces

5 File formats

6 Games

7 Misc

8 System commands

9 kernel dev

[ EDIT: I have no idea how to make a single-spaced numbered list here.. ]

> I have no idea how to make a single-spaced numbered list here

Two spaces at the beginning of each line. This will also make the text monospaced, which you may not always want.

Others have answered what the 8 means, you might also want to know why it's used, since it may be "obvious" that traceroute is a system utility. In many cases it's not obvious whether one is referring to the syscall, kernel API, system utility, etc, since overloading a single simple word is quite common.

    man 8 traceroute

8 is section number for this man page.

Quoting the manual section number is common practice in the OpenBSD project and community. It is used quite heavily in the documentation and on the mailing lists.

Manual section 8 - “System Manager” commands.

see man(1) :)

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