[net.unix-wizards] on-line manual pages on sys V?

mitchell@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU (09/03/86)

Has anyone implemented on-line manual pages (as in Berkeley Unix) on SYS V.

It seems too easy, whats the catch?

gwyn@BRL.ARPA (VLD/VMB) (09/03/86)

UNIX System V has had on-line manual pages.  Recently, they have
been unbundled so that you don't have to burn up lots of storage
for them on small systems.  We keep ours on-line.

bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (09/03/86)

My SYSV system has on-line manuals right off the tape (3Bx/SYSVR2),
maybe you better tell us exactly what machine/release is involved.

At any rate, no, it's trivial as long as you have the manuals themselves
on-line already. In fact, if you have the 4.2bsd 'man' command it will
more or less just work (you may have to customize it a little in the
header according to where you keep your manual entries.)

In fact, the older systems just used a shell script, note that if you
keep the formatted (nroff'd) versions on-line, it's not much more than

	# whatever program you use to paginate to the screen
	PAGER=pg
	# the base name for the formatted manual directory
	MANDIR=/usr/man/cat

	for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 l
	do
		if [ -f $MANDIR$i/$1.$i ]
		then
			$PAGER $MANDIR$i/$1.$i
			exit 0
		fi
	done
	# if we found the page we would have exited, so must not have it
	echo Sorry, no manual page for $1
	exit 1

Which you could obviously fancy-up with accepting multiple pages on one
command and checking for an unformatted version and filtering it through
nroff, etc etc.

The keyword stuff (apropos or 'man -k') is a little hairier, you build
an index and essentially grep that, no big deal tho.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) (09/04/86)

In article <3501@brl-smoke.ARPA>, cadovax!mitchell@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU (Mitchell Lerner) writes:
> Has anyone implemented on-line manual pages (as in Berkeley Unix) on SYS V.
> It seems too easy, whats the catch?

	We have online manual pages using man(1) on systems running UniSoft
Uniplus+ and on the NCR Tower.  Both of these System V ports do NOT pack or
preformat the manual entries; man(1) calls nroff to do the job.
	There is no "catch" other than occupying a few MB of disk space.

==>  Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp., Clarence, New York
==>  UUCP:  {allegra|decvax|rocksanne|rocksvax|watmath}!sunybcs!kitty!larry
==>  VOICE: 716/688-1231           {hplabs|ihnp4|seismo|utzoo}!/
==>  FAX:   716/741-9635 {G1,G2,G3}      "Have you hugged your cat today?" 

dpb@iwtpu.UUCP (Darryl Baker) (09/04/86)

In article <3501@brl-smoke.ARPA> mitchell@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU writes:
>
>Has anyone implemented on-line manual pages (as in Berkeley Unix) on SYS V.
>
>It seems too easy, whats the catch?

The 'cat'able man pages are on the usr tape about file number 5 or 6.
See the Administrators Guide for the exact position. The unformated pages
are on a seperate tape. I'm not sure of the name but the people at (800)
828-UNIX should be able to tell you.