Background: so I'm explaining to dear old Mom, I mean, dear Mom, how there's tons of documentation available on GNU/Linux systems, that it's typeset for the user on the fly through the man system, and how in fact one of the first uses of UNIX[tm] by AT&T was as a document editing/processing system through roff/nroff, and kin.
I've also long been a fan of 'man -Tps <manpage> | mpage -2 > /tmp/<manpage>.ps; gv -seascape /tmp/<manpage>.ps' as well. Try that if you don't already know it.
So I'm shilling GNU/Linux to other people and wanted to make a point of how much documentation there is available for it. But getting a hard page count is, well, hard. So how about we just stick to manpages.
- They all live in /usr/share/man/man* and /usr/X11/man/man*
- We can get a pagecount by using standard text output and running through 'pr', which paginates the output (per your current papersize). Grep for ' Page [0-9][0-9]* *$', and pipe through 'tail -1' to get the total count for that manual.
- Burn some cycles doing this on your system.
For my desktop, with 1631 packages installed (of 14,000+ in Debian
unstable), there are a total of 6,233 manpages, totalling 27,160 pages
of output, or about 4.3574 pages each. apt-file tells me (after
unduplicating for multiple listings of packages among Debian releases)
that there are 60,013 manpages in the distribution total.
Assuming the average pagecount holds, that's 261,500 pages of output. My typical O'Reilly book runs about 500 pages, and I can fit about 30 to a shelf, and five shelves to a bookcase, so that's about 3.5 bookcases full of manual pages.
If you took this to Kinko's to be printed 2-up at 7c per page, that's $9,152 dollars in docs, printing costs alone. $18k if you've got lazy eyes.
...and we're not counting info pages, READMEs, HOWTOs, RFCs, GNU/Linux Gazette, and the other documentation available on the system. Which I may total up later on.
From my own set of 6k+ manpages, the ten longest are:
Rank Pages ---- ----- 1 1118 ethereal-filter(4) 2 335 3 214 perltoc 4 160 5 151 smb.conf 6 148 arm-palmos-gcc 7 131 8 118 9 101 10 81 bash
Note: Because of the way I computed totals, I have to go back manually and find the manpage in question, and haven't done so for all of the above. Several of the unnamed pages are various gcc versions' manuals.
Disclaimers: this is text-formatted output, 80 column line, US 'letter' format. Postscript and text manpage output differs (PS is about 75% of the pagecount of text), and other local variances may occur.
There's been some grousing in GNU/Linux circles about the quality of documentation, particularly for a few high profile projects. But darned if we ain't got that quantity thing down.
Peace.
Not bad Karsten. But Mom says it's my head, not the docs...
H.
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