Date:	Mon, 24 Apr 95 15:15 GMT
From:	"Kevin Ashley, Systems Development, ULCC" <CZIWKGA AT VMSFE DOT ULCC DOT AC DOT UK>
To:	DJGPP <DJGPP AT SUN DOT SOE DOT CLARKSON DOT EDU>
Subject:	man files and DOS

I've been catching up on a month or so of djgpp mail and came across some
more references to the 'how do I read man pages' question. One of the standard
answers refers us to CAWF and LESS. I acquired these about a year ago and they
do an excellent job ; I've come across a small number of nroff macros that
CAWF can't seem to handle but in general the pages are formatted as I'd want.

However, using these tools is still less convenient than using man: you
need to type more, you need to remember path names to man files that are
scattered about and this can be particularly confusing when one man
file provides info on more than one subject. I started work on a simple
wrapper for CAWF and LESS which would provide a command-line interface
as similar as possible to Unix 'man'. This isn't because I think man
is the greatest interface in the world (the GNU info system is a good deal
better in many respects) but because it already exists and my fingers know
how to use it. My 'man' program allows you to collect man
pages in multiple places and locates them using a MANPATH environment
variable much as under Unix. You can look for topics in specific sections
of the manual and change the order in which sections are searched (i.e.
if there is a command named 'read' and a system call named 'read' you can
choose which 'man read' will tell you about.) I'm finishing work on
a 'makewhatis' program so that all the functionality of 'man -k', otherwise
known as 'apropos' is also available.

I did this because it was less work (for me) than converting all those files to
info format. I'm surprised someone hasn't already done it, but if they have
noone has mentioned it on this list before. Given that all the hard work is
done by CAWF and LESS, this program is fairly straightforward. I'll be
putting it up for anonymous ftp somewhere here in the near future if anyone
feels it's useful.

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Kevin Ashley                              K DOT Ashley AT Ulcc DOT ac DOT uk
Systems Development Group Manager      http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/staff/Kevin+Ashley
University of London Computer Centre.      ...ukc!ncdlab!K.Ashley
                      This is not a signature

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