[TriLUG] Man

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Mon, 2002-08-12 at 08:27, Jeff Bollinger wrote:
> Just a quick question to satisfy my curiosity.  Sometimes when you 
> search for a binary you will also get the associated man pages (on my 
> box /usr/share/man/).  It looks to me like all the man pages are 
> *.gzipped.  Whenever you view a man page, does it unzip, display, and 
> then re-zip after you view it?

Actually, you should be able to add a -d parameter to man
(i.e. man -d <command>) and man won't actually display the
man page, but instead give you a bunch of debug information.
At the bottom of the debug info you should find the exact
command man would run.

For example, on my Mandrake 8.2 system, the man pages are
compressed using bzip2.  The command it executes when I
type man man (the man page of man itself :-) it executes:

(cd /usr/share/man && (echo ".ll 9.9i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /usr/bin/bzip2
-c -d '/usr/share/man/man1/man.1.bz2'; echo; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") |
/usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc | /usr/bin/less -isrr)

So, as you see, it calls "bzip2 -c -d".  -c means to standard out
and -d is decompress.

Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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