Commands using man

This works in bash. The "!!:0" limits the argument to man to be only the first word of the last command. "!!:1" would be the second, etc.

This takes quite a while on my system. You may want to test it out with /bin first, or background it and keep working.

If you want to get rid of the "No manual entry for [whatever]" and just have the [whatever], use the following sed command after this one finishes.

There once was a day I needed this info.

Quicker way to search man pages of command for key word

Prepends paths containing man directories to your MANPATH variable for the given top level directory. If you build or install software with non-standard documentation locations, you can just add them to your MANPATH with this little function. -xdev prevents crossing filesystem boundaries when searching for man dirs.

Tested on debian and ubuntu. Translations could be useless, so "LANG=C man intro" is a better alternative.

A very interesting man page!

Example :

Curious about differences between /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin? What should be in the /sbin dir? Try this command to find out.

Tested against Red Hat & OS X

Often you find some tty programs are messed up and confused about character encoding - 'man' is a common problem and sometimes displays weird characters for apostrophes, hyphens etc etc. Another class of programs that suffer from this are those that try to use the line drawing characters - eg RedHat's tty system admin functions such as system-config-firewall-tui system-config-network-tui etc.

Adding 'LC_ALL=C' fixes most of these problems (as long as you want English! Perhaps speakers of other languages can add a comment here).

For bonus points, I've added the '-c' option to the man command so that it ignores it's cache and re-computes the man page using the C locale.

Colourful with vim regex finding goodness!

Replace the 'man' with the page to be looked up.

I actually have as a function in my .profile

function vman {

/usr/bin/man $* | /usr/bin/col -b | /usr/bin/iconv -c | view -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist nospell nonu' -

Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with "gnome-open file.pdf", or your favorite pdf viewer.

Display man page in plain text

You can view the man pages from section five by passing the section number as an argument to the man command

This is what I use to collect man pages before I print them out. There are other ones that have been submitted, so I just wanted to give out another. Requires cups-pdf to be installed.

Output manpage as plaintext using cat as pager: man -P cat commandname

And redirect its stdout into a file: man -P cat commandname > textfile.txt

Example: man -P cat ls > man_ls.txt

Creates a PDF (over ps as intermediate format) out of any given manpage.

Other useful arguments for the -T switch are dvi, utf8 or latin1.

Using perl, here, we grep the man page of fetchmail to find the paragraph starting with '-k | --keep' and ending before the paragraph starting with '-K | --nokeep'

Obviously, you can replace 'man' command with any command in this command line to do useful things. I just want to mention that there is a way to list all the commands which you can execute directly without giving fullpath.

Normally all important commands will be placed in your PATH directories. This commandline uses that variable to get commands. Works in Ubuntu, will work in all 'manpage' configured *nix systems.

You can convert any UNIX man page to .txt

Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!

Depending on the installation only certain of these man pages are installed. 12 is left out on purpose because ISO/IEC 8859-12 does not exist. To also access those manpages that are not installed use opera (or any other browser that supports all the character sets involved) to display online versions of the manpages hosted at kernel.org: