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A comment on Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug.

Re:Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug by orrymr on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:13AM (#33940923)
What does the (8) in ping(8) signify?
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Re:Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug by ruuda on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:21AM (#33940981)
The section of the system man pages. It's often used to disambiguate a tool from a libc function, when there are two manpages with the same name, but in different sections.
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Re:Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug by tobinfricke on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:18AM (#33940962)
I believe it's an old convention of indicating what section of the manpages describes the command. Section 8 is "superuser and system administration commands".

https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

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Re:Fuzzing ping(8) and finding a 24 year old bug by iamevn on Sunday December 11, 2022 @02:19AM (#33940973)
It's the category for ping's man page (System administration commands and daemons).
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