On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:41:38 -0500 Andrew Hills wrote: > > Before I was familiar with the software, having the man pages on the > website was very convenient, as the retarded version of man shipped > with RHEL (at work, of course) wouldn't let me point to an arbitrary > directory of man page files or an arbitrary man page file. This is an > edge case, but I am suggesting that it could be helpful to those of us > desperately trying to survive in a world of broken Unix machines > maintained by an MCITP-certified IT department. >
Actually man(1) is brain dead, it is calling something like this: $ zcat -f /path/to/manpage.1.gz | eqn | grap | pic | tbl | vgrind \ | refer | groff -S -P-h -Wall -mtty-char -man-Tascii | less Missing filters are skipped in pipeline, still it is long pipeline. Much better replacement for groff as man page parser is mdocml[1]. It can be used this way: $ zcat -f /path/to/manpage.1.gz | mandoc | less I would say that simplest man(1) for mandoc can be written in ~10 lines of shell script (check if man page is compressed or not depending on file suffix and pipe it to mandoc and pager). On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:00:32 -0500 Andrew Hills wrote: > > Unfortunately, no. But, when man pages were not immediately available > online, I hacked together some godawful sh script that called the > right sequence of nroff and whatever else man uses. In any case, my > need has passed; the suckless tools are not so complicated that I > can't remember their syntax. The number of users stuck in completely > backwards environments is probably so low that it is not worth the > effort of suckless developers to update yet another section of the > website whenever something changes. > Producing HTML output with mandoc is also simple: $ zcat -f /path/to/manpage.1.gz | mandoc -Thtml \ -Ostyle=/path/to/style.css > manpage.html Other alternative is plain text file: $ zcat -f /usr/to/manpage.1.gz | mandoc | col -b > manpage.txt I don't think that col(1) is shipped with any Linux distribution, but this is small tool and source from *BSD repositories can be used. [1] http://mdocml.bsd.lv/
