How to find man pages for C structs (struct sockaddr_in)?

Question

I find it difficult to find man pages for structures used on the socket. Therefore, I am currently studying them from a separate online tutorial. But it would be nice to know how to look for these structures in the man pages themselves.

I am using a Linux Debian 8.3 system.

For example, I found information about struct addrinfo in man getaddrinfo .

But I could not find information about struct sockaddr_in on any manual page. Which manual page contains information about this structure? And how do you know the manual pages for such structures in general?

Answer 1

You can find this specific structure by typing man 7 ip and then doing a manual search or pressing / and typing sockaddr_in .

If you don’t know which section to look for, you can try using a quick search with man -k sockaddr_in . If this does not give you the result you are looking for, try dragging it with man -k sockaddr_in , it can be very slow because it scans all the human files on your system.

@ Jean-FrançoisFabre his comment on using a search engine is probably the fastest way to find the information you need.