Mail Archives: cygwin/2001/07/03/21:12:53
Jonadab,
Well, there's more to the manual than section 1, but that would be
accommodated with this variation:
grep /usr/man/man*/*
Then there's the fact that you'd get all the lines from all the man page
files, when what you want is to know the names of the commands on which to
run "man." So:
grep -l /usr/man/man*/*
But the real problem is that you'll probably get too many false hits this
way, since any old mention of the search pattern, regardless of whether the
man page author considered it a "key word" in the synoptic description of
the command.
You should be aware, too, that these files are man page _sources_ written
in nroff for the man macros (plus, possibly, tbl, eqn or others). This
could cause further false hits. In some cases, it might even cause a miss.
The pre-formatted pages for things that have already been "manned" are in
/usr/man/cat*, but the formatting, including lots of embedded grunk (like
backspace-encoded overtyping to get bold) and hyphenation, make grepping
problematic.
If you have no luck with apropos / man -k, then the grep technique might
work. Once up a time on a non-Unix system (MPW), I created an "apropos"
command that had options to control how much of a help file entry (the MPW
equivalent to man pages) would be searched. The default was still just the
synopsis.
By the way, I don't think speed would be a problem with your suggestion for
me, but I have two fast CPUs and pretty much the fastest disks and I/O
adaptor available today. From this standpoint, I'd suggest egrep, which I
use for all my "grepping" needs.
Randall Schulz
At 15:26 2001-07-03, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
># It may also be worth noting, since you are recommending this for
># newbies, that you have to type "/usr/sbin/makewhatis" to create the
># whatis database for apropos to be useful. ;-)
>
>Wouldn't it be just as easy to grep /usr/man/man1/*
>for your key word? Or would that take longer?
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