You cannot search ! directly because it puts process behind. For instance, you cannot search ! in sed man.How can you search ! in man?
How do you search ! in man sed?
shell;quoting;man;less
man itself is a tool to format manual pages, not to browse them. The tool you use to browse the man pages is a pager. The default pager on most systems is less.In less, when you press / or ? to search, a few characters have a special meaning if you type them at the beginning of the search expression. The exclamation mark is one of them. To avoid ! having a special meaning, put a backslash before it. It is very common for backslash to mean interpret the next character literally.So to search for an exclamation mark, press /\! Enter.