Thursday, May 20, 2010

Citing UNIX Man Pages in MLA format

My professor for CS 260A Linux System Administration at CCSF wanted me to cite my sources that I used for my presentation.  I did a small Single Sign On presentation covering mainly PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) and NSS (Name Service Switch).

As a lot of research in UNIX or Linux requires references help files within operating system (man pages), I was wondering, just how does one cite man pages?

I think the man pages as sources of information are just as legitimate as any other source.  But unfortunately, I could not find any reference online to how to do this.  Thus, I invented a standard, using pieces from citing Encyclopedias and from referencing web pages. 

So far I came up with this:
  • "Man Page Title." Operating System Version Name, Name Version. Man Page Tomb, Date: Man Page Reference. Shell. Date Accessed <command-to-get-man-page>
These would be some examples:
  • "Pluggable Authentication Modules for Linux." Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10. Linux-Pam Manual, August 2008: pam 7. Shell. 8 May 2010 <man pam>.
  • "System Databaes and Name Service Switch configuration file." Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10. Linux Programmer's Manaual, January 1999: nsswitch.conf 5. Shell. 8 May 2010 <man nsswitch.conf>.
  • "System wide and per-user daemon/agent manager." Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6.3. BSD System Manager's Manual, May 1999: launchd 8. Shell. 20 May 2010 <man launchd>.

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