man7

man7 is the designation used in Unix-like systems for the seventh section of the manual pages (man pages). Section 7 contains documentation about topics that do not fit into other manual sections, serving as a repository for miscellaneous information, conventions, file formats, standards, and general overviews of system interfaces and data representations.

The content typically covers topics such as file formats and data representations, protocol specifications, encoding schemes, naming and documentation conventions, and historical notes about interfaces or systems. Because these pages are not tied to a single programming interface or user command, they are generally intended as reference material rather than tutorials for programming or operation.

Access and navigation: on most Linux distributions, the pages reside in directories such as /usr/share/man/man7. A topic can be viewed with commands like man 7 topic, or man topic if the topic is registered in section 7. Users can search across sections with tools such as apropos or man -k, and can constrain the search to section 7 with appropriate options.

Relation to other sections: section 7 complements the other man page sections by documenting general knowledge, standards, and conventions that underlie user commands (section 1), system calls and library interfaces (sections 2 and 3), file formats (section 5), and kernel documentation (section 9). Together, the sections provide a broad reference for system behavior, compatibility, and data interpretation.