On Friday 01 October 2021 22:52:59 David Wright wrote: > On Fri 01 Oct 2021 at 20:53:26 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 05:44:41PM -0700, Fred wrote: > > > man command | col -b > command.txt > > > > Curious. > > > > unicorn:~$ man ls > ls1 > > unicorn:~$ man ls | col -b > ls2 > > unicorn:~$ ls -l ls1 ls2 > > -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 8299 Oct 1 20:49 ls1 > > -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 7745 Oct 1 20:49 ls2 > > > > Glancing at the diff -u between the two files, most of the changes > > appear to be whitespace related. > > > > Opening them both in vim, the second one has a bunch of literal tab > > characters, whereas the first one has no tabs at all -- only spaces. > > > > So I guess most (or all?) of the size reduction is groups of spaces > > being replaced by tabs. > > Yes, diff -ubw will confirm that whitespace is the only difference. > I'm too lazy to check that the /apparently/ significant differences > shown by diff and diff -u are merely caused by the left-margin offset, > which makes TABs skip to different columns from those intended. > > Like others, I tried to guess what Gene really wanted (I can barely > believe the answer) and to come up with a suitable method. I also > tried out others' suggestions. We don't know what the mysterious > man 9 actually is (unless there's a well-known command named "9"), > so I used man man and man bash¹.
There is a well known man 9 command, it means to save man the trouble of searching the whole database, as there might be duplicate names to confuse the issue, but it this case look in man/man9 for the requested manpage. Sheesh, doesn't anyone read manpages anymore? :o) [...] Cheers, Gene Heskett. -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
