Re: Phase 2 (is: Man Pages in Text?)

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

Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 06:10:50 GMT

On Sat, 22 May 2004 00:05:04 GMT, Alan Connor <zzzzzz@xxx.yyy> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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].

<snip>

Workable solution:

1) converted manpages into plain text with col -b and put them in
   /usr/doc/man/cat[1-8] with names like less.1

2) aliased man to man -M /usr/doc/man

3) gunzipped the nroff manpages and removed everything but:
  
  .TH LESS 1 "Version 358: 08 Jul 2000"
  .SH NAME
  less \- opposite of more
  .SH SYNOPSIS
  
  in every file, and gzipped them again. /usr/share/man/man[0-8] is now
  basically empty. I've freed up many megabytes of disk space.
  
4) ran mandb and put a function in my .bashrc:

       a () {

             apropos "$1" | less ;

       }

The files in /usr/doc/man/* are writable by me as a normal user.

Now my man pages come up in a blink and I can add notes to them
easily. Apropos is faster too.

Thanks to Barry and Ed and Juha and Chuck.

AC