Re: Man Pages in Text?

From: Alan Connor (zzzzzz_at_xxx.yyy)
Date: 05/21/04 

Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 18:19:36 GMT

On Fri, 21 May 2004 13:00:52 -0400, Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>
> In article <qRhrc.3448$Tn6.584@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
> Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 21 May 2004 02:13:35 -0400, Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > In article <d9grc.4288$be.3593@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
>> > Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I'd like to turn all of my manpages into text, uncompressed.
>> >>
>> >> Can I do this and still use man? I've gone through man man and
>> >> man catman, but don't see a way to do this.
>> >
>> > That's exactly what catman does, isn't it?
>> >
>>
>> You misunderstand me. I want to *permanently* change all the man pages in my
>> MANPATH into un-compressed plain text.
>>
>> To cut groff and gzip out of the loop completely.
>>
>> That's not what catman does.
>
> Yes it is.
>
>>
>> Like I said above, I READ the manpage.
>
> I know you read it, I thought you didn't understand it.
>
>>
>> From man catman: Cat pages are generally much faster to display than the
>> original manual pages, but require extra storage space.
>>
>> endquote
>>
>> Note the word "extra". This is an adjunct to man, not a replacement for it.
>> (unless I am missing something, which would hardly be a novel situation :-)
>
> After you run catman, delete all the original nroff files. Man looks
> for the cat page first, and if it doesn't find it, it runs nroff on the
> source file.
>

As root, I ran catman 1, and it created the catpages, gzipped, in
/var/cache/man/cat1.

(they survived a reboot, too)

man -M /var/cache/man less yielded the man page for less in a blink,
but I couldn't edit standard input from gzip, so I gunzipped the file
/var/cache/man/cat1/less.1.gz and then did the man command above.

Worked fine, though when I hit "v" in less to edit the file there was
quite a bit of junk there, though nothing like the amount in the
un-formatted man page.

So I guess I'll have to write a sed script to remove the junk and
edit /etc/manpath.config, and change the perms/ownership on the
directory tree.

Very good, Barry. Thanks a lot!

AC