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.