Date: Mon, 24 Apr 95 15:15 GMT From: "Kevin Ashley, Systems Development, ULCC" To: DJGPP 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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