Hi, On 24/01/2013 2:12 PM, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Russell Coker wrote:
A man page which is more than 3000 lines long is difficult to read at the best of times, the rsync man page is about the length of a 9 page magazine article!
It's 43 A4 pages here, when rendered thusly:
man -Tps rsync | ps2pdf - rsync.pdf
Output quality varies between manpages, but hopefully the lurkers appreciate learning that little trick.
Yes, a nice little "trick", but you need ghostscript installed to get ps2pdf -- don't know if it is available in any other packages. Also, on Unix systems you can usually press the "v" character on the keyboard and you have vi or vim open up with the page. A little substitution (search and replace) and it can be readable. man --help|grep ascii -7, --ascii display ASCII translation of certain latin1 chars Extending on this you could simply do: man -7 rsync > rsync.txt wc -l rsync.txt 2079 rsync.txt And with many Linux tools, you can do a quick help as follows: rsync --help sync --help|wc -l 144 Usually there is much more concise output.
As you say, manpages are generally a reference material, not a HOWTO guide -- they work best when you already know what you're looking for, and have just forgotten the specifics details.
Yes, but they also usually have some examples and Google isn't a bad search engine, even if Google is an advertising company... ;) Nonetheless, the other interesting information from the thread was great! -- Kind Regards AndrewM