Re: Man Pages in Text?

From: Barry Margolin (barmar_at_alum.mit.edu)
Date: 05/21/04 

Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 15:25:15 -0400

In article <YKrrc.4677$be.2218@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
 Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> wrote:
> As root, I ran catman 1, and it created the catpages, gzipped, in
> /var/cache/man/cat1.

gzipping the catpages must be a recent (perhaps GNU) feature, I don't
think it was ever done when I used to administer Suns.

>
> (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.

That's necessary to get things like underlining of keywords.

> 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.

Try "col -b". 

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

Relevant Pages