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I've been trying to read up on some C libraries from die.net, and I'm a bit thrown off by numbers inside parameters, i.e:

See Also
alarm(2), nanosleep(2), signal(2), signal(7)

Referenced By
aio(7), clock_nanosleep(2), getitimer(2), perlfaq5(1), pth(3), sleep(1), time(7), ualarm(3), upslog(8), usleep(3)

The only time I've known to put anything in actual parameters in documentation is when I give example code. But this clearly isn't example code. In fact, several of these functions don't even take integers for parameters.

I don't understand why they would say signal(2) when they could just say signal().

What do the numbers mean?

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Funny Geeks
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    The number is the [section of the manual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page) referencing that function. Different functions/utilitis can appear by name in more than one place in the overall manual schema. – WhozCraig Feb 13 '19 at 16:45
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    Duplicate of https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3586/what-do-the-numbers-in-a-man-page-mean – Tanktalus Feb 13 '19 at 16:46
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    Read [the`man` man page](https://linux.die.net/man/1/man). – Some programmer dude Feb 13 '19 at 16:46
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs on unix.stackexchange.com, but already has a duplicate there. – Tanktalus Feb 13 '19 at 16:48
  • @Tanktalus I think it's better to close as a duplicate rather than off-topic. – Funny Geeks Feb 13 '19 at 16:51
  • I suggest [POSIX.1-2017](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/) for documentation rather than die.net (unless you really need linuxy stuff, in which case I have no suggestions). – pmg Feb 13 '19 at 16:55
  • @FunnyGeeks I tried, but because it's on a different site of the stack exchange network, and not stack overflow, I couldn't. (Otherwise, I agree with you.) – Tanktalus Feb 13 '19 at 17:00
  • This has been asked more than once before. There should be a good Q&A somewhere on SO (as well as on other SE sites). – Jonathan Leffler Feb 13 '19 at 17:44

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