You can convert any UNIX man page to .txt

attribution: Thanks to repellent on perlmonks.org source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=684459

Using nroff , it is possible to view the otherwise garbled man page with col command.

Place the line above in your ~/.bahsrc file. Now every time you issue the 'vb' command, you invoke the vim editor to edit it, then source it so the changes take effect immediately. Notes: * This mechanism is not working well if your .bashrc contains commands that should not be sourced more than once. * This trick also work for your csh or tclsh users: place the following line in your ~/.cshrc file: alias vc 'vim ~/.cshrc; source ~/.cshrc Thank you adzap for pointing out the missing quote

Something I do a lot is extract columns from some input where cut is not suitable because the columns are separated by not a single character but multiple spaces or tabs. So I often do things like: ... | awk '{print $7, $8}' ... which is a lot of typing, additionally slowed down when typing symbols like '{}$ ... Using the simple one-line function above makes it easier and faster: ... | col 7 8 How it works: The one-liner defines a new function with name col The function will execute awk, and it expects standard input (coming from a pipe or input redirection) The function arguments are processed with sed to use them with awk: replace all spaces with ,$ so that for example 1 2 3 becomes 1,$2,$3, which is inserted into the awk command to become the well formatted shell command: awk '{print $1,$2,$3}' Allows negative indexes to extract columns relative to the end of the line. Credit: http://www.bashoneliners.com/oneliners/oneliner/144/ Show Sample Output

Dumping man pages to text typically retains certain formatting such as foo^H^H^H___ for underscoring, and reverse-line feeds (not sure why). 'col -bx' removes these. Show Sample Output

Display man page in plain text