lindahl@arrisun3.utarl.edu (Charlie S. Lindahl) (05/06/91)
All:
Having gotten a number of responses to my previous query about
X man pages not working with man (due to the ".3X11" and ".3Xt"
extensions) on a SUN, it is time for a summary of responses.
The consensus: man pages should be renamed to ".3" or ".1" to work
correctly with "man". However, I got one answer from Convex that
suggests a perl-written replacement for man (I include that
reference below).
Thanx to the following respondents: gengenba@forwiss.uni-passau.de
(Michael Gengenbach), ric@cs.arizona.edu (Ric Anderson),
christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu (Christos S. Zoulas), bp@cs.brown.edu
(Boris Putanec), amir@taux01.nsc.com (Amir J. Katz),
hr@sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin), vanandel@stout.atd.ucar.edu
(Joe Van Andel), and gargoyle!chinet.chi.il.us!justice (Michael Justice).
Charlie S. Lindahl
Automation and Robotics Research Institute
University of Texas at Arlington
Internet EMAIL: lindahl@cse.uta.edu
Standard disclaimer: Ain't no opinion but my own.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x,comp.unix.questions
From: Tom Christiansen <tchrist@convex.COM>
Subject: Re: MIT X11R4 man pages glitches?
Keywords: manual,troff,nroff,xlib,xt
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Distribution: comp
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1991 01:09:46 GMT
All the above problems are taken care of by my perl rewrite of the man
program. You can get the package via anon ftp from convex.com in
/pub/man.shar.Z, or I can mail it to you. Here is the FEATURES file:
--tom
Features include but are not limited to:
* almost always faster than standard man (try 'man me')
* take much less diskspace for catpages
* supports per-tree tmac macros
* compressed man and cat files
* user-definable man path via $MANPATH or -M optoin
* $MANPATH autoconfigged based on $PATH if not set
* user-definable section search order via -S or $MANSECT. Thus
programmers can get stty(3) before stty(1).
* $PAGER support
* show all the places you would find a man page (-w option)
and in what order.
* display all available man page on a topic (-a option)
* no limits on what subsections go where (if you want to add 7x, ok)
* support for multi-char sections like man1m/*.1m or manavs/*.avs
* man -K for regexp apropos
* grep through all the man pages in $MANPATH
* section and subsection indexing for long man pages
* support for alternate architectures docs on same machine
* ability to run man on a local file
* ability to easily troff (or preview) a man page
* recognizes embedded filter directives for tbl and eqn
* does the right thing for man tree that don't have DBM whatis files
* support for connecting online problem reports to right man page
* there's an extended usage message (man -U) for further help
and to show current defaults.
Here are some features of this version of makewhatis:
* it's faster.
* tries hard to make pretty output, stripping troff directives.
* doesn't blow up on more files in a man directory
than the shell will glob.
* accepts troff string macros for the dashes in the
the NAME section.
* prints a diagnostic for a malformed NAME section.
* detects linked (hard, soft, or via .so) man pages
* finds *all* references in the NAME section.
* recognizes MH's man macros (and .Sh from lwall).
* many other things that makewhatis used to do wrong
Here are some supporting utilities that are included:
* catman -- new version that groks compressed files
* catwhatis -- display the whatis databases
* straycats -- find cat pages with no man page ancestor
* countman -- find how many man pages you can get at
* cfman -- find bad SEE ALSO references in man pages
--
Charlie S. Lindahl
Automation and Robotics Research Institute
University of Texas at Arlington
Internet EMAIL: lindahl@cse.uta.edu
Standard disclaimer: Ain't no opinion but my own.