What does the 1 stand for in command names like bat(1) git(1) on man pages

Question

When reading man pages I often see the command name followed by a (1) . bat in particular has made the point of making their headline A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.

I wonder what the (1) means? And if is there a circumstance it could be another number?

Answer 1

Do man man and you will be enlightened. The numbers you mention refer to the section of the whole of the manual pages.

From man man :

The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages they contain.

   1   Executable programs or shell commands
   2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
   3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
   4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
   5   File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
   6   Games
   7   Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
   8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
   9   Kernel routines [Non standard]

Answer 2

The manual pages are organised by section. To see the entire list, try man man . Here is a snippet.

   1   Executable programs or shell commands
   2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
   3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
   4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
   5   File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
   6   Games
   7   Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
   8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
   9   Kernel routines [Non standard]

Something like printf might have entries in multiple sections of the man pages. Here is an example

% man -k '^printf$'
printf (1)           - format and print data
printf (3)           - formatted output conversion

You can see that there are two manual pages for printf - one in section 1 and the other in section 3 . The short hand representation for "printf in section 1 of the man pages" is printf(1) . You can request this specific page by doing man 1 printf or do man -a printf to get all the pages one after another.