Baslinux mailing list

[Ian <info AT freedomnet.org.uk>]

> 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

Thanks, Im not hot on scripts but I can understand that. I dont
have Lynx yet but perhaps something could be done with Links.

> 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.

I collected BL3 last night but havnt had time to play with it yet.
Ive looked at some of the man pages supplied with BL1 but when Ive
unzipped them they arent just plain text.

> 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.

Well OTT from my POV. At the moment, Id just like to be able to
add the odd man page to those supplied and preferably view it
with zcat, the same as the others.

> 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.

or perhaps one script for all three. Now that would overtax my
regular expression skills :)

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

Now Ive looked more thoroughly, seems like these are for
different types of things, programs, functions, etc.


-- 
Bye now,
        Ian.