viewing man pagesForum: Other Help Topics Topic: viewing man pages started by: dbickin Posted by dbickin on Aug. 18 2005,21:58
I have an hd install. I noticed that the man pages are installed, but using the man command still tries to connect to the internet, and given the machine isn't on the network, fails miserably. Is there a way to have man actually use the local files?Thanks, David Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Aug. 19 2005,03:53
apt-get install manthe man in DSL is a tiny perl script. -J.P. Posted by ke4nt1 on Aug. 19 2005,06:20
There is also the full man.uci, a very ram-friendly version for DSL,in the 'testing' section of the repository, which would be good for "offline" usage.. 73 ke4nt Posted by adssse on Aug. 19 2005,13:37
Didnt even realize... Once school starts this will be very handy to have. Thanks for bringing it to me attention. Posted by dbickin on Aug. 22 2005,15:56
I was finally able to grab a copy of man.uci and copy it on to the machine in question. It works. Thanks! I had to replace the man in /usr/local/bin with a link to /opt/man/bin. I would have thought that the mydsl-load would have done that for me. Did I do something wrong? David Posted by mikshaw on Aug. 22 2005,18:52
UCI extensions do not initially write anything to the system, except to create a mountpoint, and the optional menu item and desktop icon. Even if they could write to the system, they should not overwrite the current files except in very special cases. Any deletion or overwriting of files is up to the user (in my opinion).If you have an extension such as this, which uses the same command as an existing program, you could also have done one of the following to run the new program: 1) Use the full path to the program (/opt/man/bin man <manpage>, as stated in the *info file*) 2) Add the /opt/man/bin path to the beginning of your PATH variable: export PATH="/opt/man/bin:$PATH" Putting it at the beginning causes the new man to be found before the old one. 3) Create a symlink to the executable in a directory which is already in your path. The main reason for doing one of the above, particularly in a HD install, is that the original man script is left untouched. By overwriting that script, you now no longer have the ability to use it. Also, you will now need to remount the man.uci, or copy the original script back, in order to use a man program after a reboot. Posted by dbickin on Aug. 22 2005,23:31
Well, I did rename the original man script, though I can't imagine why since it was useless. (No network means the extent of its usefulness was saying "host not found".) Smarter would have been to take the time to see how much duplication I now have. I found the actual manpages sitting on my drive, I just lacked the program to read them. Now I have the program plus a whole new set of man pages to go with it. A project for another day. David Posted by mikshaw on Aug. 02 2006,22:11
Digging up this year-old thread just because i bumped into something last night that I prefer to the bulky man package and its dependencies, at least in DSL. The application man2html works, I assume, as a stream editor of sorts so it doesn't require nroff, groff, and whatever else man uses. I use this command to convert and display man formatted pages in netrik:
Of course, man2html is not a part of DSL, but it can be extracted from a debian package (i don't think it's in man.uci, but maybe...). It's a single file that can be run from anywhere, and has no additional dependencies. < http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin....ase=all > < http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.html > This is what I have in my Midnight Commander extensions file, to run this command automatically when i press Enter on a man file:
I tried getting it piped to Dillo, but so far no luck without first creating a file. |