Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

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