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Name | Description | Compression of roff files | Man pages | Traditional troff extensions | New groff extensions | Authors | See also | COLOPHON |
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groff_filenames(5) File Formats Manual groff_filenames(5)
groff_filenames - filename conventions used in roff systems
Since the evolution of roff in the 1970s, a whole bunch of
filename extensions for roff files were used.
The roff extensions refer to preprocessors or macro packages.
These extensions are fixed in all Unix-like operating systems.
Later on, groff added some more extensions. This man page is
about these filename extensions.
Each roff file can be optionally compressed. That means that the
total filename ends with a compressor name. So the whole
filename has the structure <name>.<extension>[.<compression>].
Best-known are the compressor extensions .Z, .gz, and .bzip2.
Relatively new is .xz.
From now on, we will ignore the compressions and only comment the
structure <name>.<extension>.
The Unix manual pages are widely called man pages. The man page
style is the best-known part of the roff language.
The extensions for man should be better documented. So this is
documented here.
Files written in the man language use the following extension:
*.<section>[<group>].
Man page sections
The traditional man page <section> is a digit from 1 to 8.
<name>.1
<name>.2
<name>.3
<name>.4
<name>.5
<name>.6
<name>.7
<name>.8
Classic man page sections.
In older commercial Unix systems, the 3 characters l, n, and o
were also used as section names. This is today deprecated, but
there are still documents in this format.
<name>.l
<name>.n
<name>.o
Deprecated man page sections, which stood for “local”,
“new”, and “old”, respectively.
Man page group extensions
The <group> extension in .<section>[<group>] is optional, but it
can be any string of word characters. Usually programmers use a
group name that is already used, e.g., x for X Window System
documents or tcl to refer to the Tcl programming language.
Examples:
groff.1
is the man page for groff in section 1 without a group
xargs.1posix.gz
is the man page for the program xargs in section 1 and
group posix; moreover it is compressed with gz (gzip).
config.5ssl
OpenSSL CONF library configuration files from section 5
with group ssl.
dpkg-reconfigure.8cdebconf
man page for the program dpkg-reconfigure in section 8 and
group cdebconf.
Source of man pages
There are 2 roff languages for writing man pages: man and mdoc.
The names of these 2 styles are taken as extensions for the
source code files of man pages in the groff package.
<name>.man
traditional Unix-like man page format within groff source
files.
<name>.n
A temporary man page file produced from a name.man man
page by a run of make within the groff source package.
<name>.mdoc
Man page format in BSD.
Files using macro packages
The classical roff languages were interpreted by the traditional
troff and nroff programs.
There were several roff languages, each represented by a macro-
package. Each of these provided a suitable file name extension:
<name>.me
roff file using the me macro package.
<name>.mm
roff file using the mm macro package
<name>.ms
roff file using the ms macro package
All of these classical roff languages and their extensions are
still very active in groff.
Source code for macro packages (tmac files)
In traditional roff the source code for the macro packages was
stored in TMAC files. Their file names have the form:
tmac.<package>,
<package> is the name of the macro package without the
leading m character, which is reintegrated by the option
-m.
For example, tmac.an is the source for the man macro package.
In the groff source, more suitable file names were integrated;
see later on.
Preprocessors
Moreover, the following preprocessors were used as filename
extension:
<name>.chem
for the integration of chemical formulas
<name>.eqn
for the mathematical use of equations
<name>.pic
graphical tool
<name>.tbl
for tables with tbl
<name>.ref
for files using the prefer preprocessor
[1mroff[24m files
<name>.t
<name>.tr
for files using the roff language of any kind
GNU roff groff is the actual roff standard, both for classical
roff and new extensions. So even the used new extensions in the
source code should be regarded as actual standard. The following
extensions are used instead of classical .t or .tr:
<name>.groff
<name>.roff
general ending for files using the groff language
Source code for macro packages (tmac files)
As the classical form tmac.<package_without_m>, of the TMAC file
names is quite strange, groff added the following structures:
<package_without_m>.tmac
m<package>.tmac
groff_m<package>.tmac
Files using new macro packages
Groff uses the following new macro packages:
<name>.mmse
file with swedish mm macros for groff
<name>.mom
files written in the groff macro package mom
<name>.www
files written in HTML-like groff macros.
Preprocessors and postprocessors
<name>.hdtbl
Heidelberger tables, an alternative to the preprocessor
tbl. See groff_hdtbl(7).
<name>.grap
files written for the graphical grap processor.
<name>.grn
for including gremlin(1), pictures, see grn(1).
<name>.pdfroff
transform this file with pdfroff of the groff system
This document was written by Bernd Warken ⟨groff-bernd.warken-72@
web.de⟩.
History and future
roff(7), man-pages(7), groff_diff(7), groff(7)
Compression
uncompress(1posix), gzip2(1), bzip2(1), xz(1)
This page is part of the groff (GNU troff) project. Information
about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/groff.git⟩ on 2024-06-14. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
groff 1.23.0.rc1.1931-35c9b 30 January 2022 groff_filenames(5)
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HTML rendering created 2024-06-26 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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