Phase 2 (is: Man Pages in Text?)

From: Alan Connor (zzzzzz_at_xxx.yyy)
Date: 05/22/04

  • Next message: Alan Connor: "Re: Phase 2 (is: Man Pages in Text?)" 
    Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 00:05:04 GMT

    This is where I'm at:

    [ I really do want to rm the nroff manpages. Have use for all that space. ]

    Man pages converted to text with col-b in /usr/doc/man/cat[1-8].

    (If I name the cat[1-8] directories to man[1-8], it still works, but
    less gets standard in instead of reading the file.)

    (man -M /usr/doc/man whatever)

    But, naturally, man -k, etc, don't work, so I have to update the db
    with mandb.

    (man -M /usr/doc/man -k whatever)

    I'm thinking the best way to do this is make /usr/share/man/man[1-8]
    symlinks to /usr/doc/man/cat[1-9], preserving their ^.*.gz$ names,
    then running mandb --create and thereafter running mandb with the
    -s option to make it "...not spend time looking for or adding
    information to the databases regarding stray cats."

    Does this sound reasonable? I really don't wan't to have to clean out
    the man* utilities and re-install.

    I have less in /var/cache/man/cat1, but not in /usr/share/man/man1
    (at the moment).

    When I ran man -k less I got:

    This information is worse than useless for *(C`perlTk*(C' users (3pm)\
     [Tk::Internals] - what is Perl Tk interface doing when you call Tk functions.

    bzless (1) - file perusal filter for crt viewing of bzip2 compressed text
    eview (1) - easy Vim, edit a file with Vim and setup for modeless editing
    lessecho (1) - expand metacharacters, such as * and ?, in filenames on Unix systems.
    lessfile (1) - "input preprocessor" for less.
    lesskey (1) - specify key bindings for less
    lesspipe (1) - "input preprocessor" for less.
    ray_cs (4) - Raylink wireless LAN - PCMCIA card device driver
    zless (1) - file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text

    That first line does not appear in the less manpage in
    /var/cache/man/cat1/less.1 (I split it and added the "\".)

    ---------------------
    I made /usr/share/man/man1/less.1.gz a symlink to /var/cache/man/cat1/less.1
    ran mandb -s and got this:
    mandb: warning: /var/cache/man/cat1/less.1: whatis parse for less(1) failed

    And less still comes up as text when called by man less and man -k less still
    turns up as above.

    So much for that idea!!

    Hope someone has a better one.

    AC

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