Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] Displaying man pages

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: info AT freedomnet.org.uk, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Displaying man pages
  • Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 20:43:28 +0000 (UTC)

Some list members helped me to write a script that converts gzipped man pages to html and then displays them with lynx. You need /bin/man2html (from some package, I forget which - see MANIFEST.GZ) and the man pages need to end in .gz and be in /usr. You can look only in /usr/local or /usr/X11R6 if you modify the script.

zcat `find /usr -name $1.*gz` | man2html | lynx -stdin

I called the script mann.

mann program
will look for program.*gz (program.1.gz, etc.) and gunzip it and convert to html and display the html on the monitor.

Make sure to use ` (under the tilde) not '.

Lynx does not properly display some characters, so that the Mplayer man page won't display right. (I forget the exact characters, probably things like < > and other things specific to browsers).

The man pages in BL3 are in text format and were converted to that using some program from a package that Steven can tell you more about.

man2html is in /a9/man.tgz
It has no special dependencies (libc and ld-linux).

Installing groff and man.tgz adds about 10MB to your hard drive.
But they produce better output and know where to look for man pages.

Man pages can be in several places such as /usr/man and /usr/local/man and /usr/X11R6/man so you could write three scripts to look specifically in these places instead of looking through ALL of /usr (which is slower).
I have a manx for /usr/X11R6/man.

I don't know why they are split up into man1, man2, etc.

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Ian wrote:

This query is probably a bit simpler than the Mutt one.
I cant work out how to display man pages other than
those included with BL1. I can see those use something
called zless but this doesnt format other pages out
of various packages properly. I know theres something
called groff but that seems to want other things, also
man pages seem to normally be in directories called
man1, man2 etc. I cant make any sense out of it all.
Be great if there was some way of converting these
other man pages to BL form.

--
Bye now,
Ian.
_______________________________________________
BasLinux mailing list
BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux


keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page