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anyone know of a good solution for reading manpages without man(1)? something with cat(1) and troff(1) perhaps? !gnu !linux
about 9 months ago from xmpp- Alexander Javier Salas Bastidas likes this.
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@eightyeight may GNU info, assuming it won't just invoke the man behind the curtain :-)
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@eightyeight I know that konqueror does man and info, but I recall you don't like KDE stuff.
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@lxoliva problem is, i have manpages installed, but no man(1) and no info(1), without the ability to install either
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@lxoliva Ugh. GNU info(1) is the single most annoying thing I've ever had to read documentation with. *cringe*
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@ralesk ah yes, however i'm not in a gui environment
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@eightyeight I guess ?roff to the rescue — I haven't really had to invoke any of them directly, but that's all what man does anyway, dunnit?
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@ralesk yeah, that's what i'm thinking. that's why i'm asking, hoping someone knows the solution
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@ralesk groff-utf8 -P-c -Tutf8 -mandoc hg.1 | less # I cheated and looked into how our mc.ext does it.
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@eightyeight not a *good* solution, but "gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | troff -" will work !linux !gnu
dno likes this. -
@eightyeight found this in my ancient Solaris2.2 bashrc; untested for 10+y: lman () { nroff -Tman -man $1.[1-8nl]* | less; }
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@eightyeight Hopefully that previous one works. Not exactly sure where the groff-utf8 comes from in UHU, but anyway, I'm sure you'll fig out
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@ralesk or "zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | troff"
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@lxoliva probably helpful to add loops for testing(if not in /usr/man, check /usr/local/man, etc.)
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@lxoliva can you explain the syntax?
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@lxoliva or do the nroff flags do that for you?
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@eightyeight cd into the directory containing the mymanual.# and run “lman mymanual”
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@tekk -EDONTREMEMBER 10+ years is a long time ;-) prolly more like 15+, even
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@lxoliva what i'm not getting, and failing in the shell, is "$1.[1-8nl]*"
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@tekk I used it to read uninstalled (l is for local) man-pages, so it won't search MANPATH
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@eightyeight Peculiar, neither troff nor plain groff work for me that way, while nroff gives a moderately decent output. Didn't play w/ args
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@wgreenhouse yeah, not a great solution. zcat(1) also works fine instead of gunzip(1) in that example
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@ralesk and then, if it was about beauty, the program should not have been named “man”, but “woman” :-D
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@eightyeight remember the bit about cd'ing to the dir? run lman foo, and it will look for foo.1 or somesuch to feed to nroff
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@lxoliva is it tested, because it's erroring out for me
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@eightyeight it was tested almost 20 years ago on Solaris2.2. never used it on GNU, may need some adjusting for .gz etc
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@eightyeight nroff -man foo.1 should do it.
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@jeffg perfect! "zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | nroff -man | less". beautiful
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