Baslinux mailing list

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

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Ian wrote:

> > 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.

We were not able to pipe things to links.

You could try viewing manually with man2html and links by first cd'ing to 
where the man page is.  You might need to gunzip a .gz file first.  Then 
man2html manpage.1 > manpage.html
d  (invokes links with a list of files in the current directory)
Click on the manpage.html file.

I have not tested this and it might not work.

Can anyone else come up with something more elegant using links?

You can get lynx for Slackware 4.0 and use that but it has dependencies 
(ncurses).

> > 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.

If you have an internet connection you can find the man pages online as 
html and download a plain text version using links.  You can gzip it and 
use zcat after that.

> > 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 :)

If you have one script for all three, it has to look in all of /usr and 
takes a lot longer.

> > 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.
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org