Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!convex!usenet From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Complete Man Pages (was Re: UNIX Documentation) Keywords: unix, documentation, manual, research, index Message-ID: <1991Jan12.104735.11790@convex.com> Date: 12 Jan 91 10:47:35 GMT References: <1991Jan9.200617.25296@eci386.uucp> <1991Jan10.172329.13247@julius.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991Jan11.135247.7685@tcsc3b2.tcsc.com> Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account) Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX Lines: 27 Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com If you have a man program that understands MANPATHs, then you can pretty easily maintain multiple sets of man pages on the same machine. Just keep each set in a separately-named but conveniently-accessible directory. Then you can get a them with something close to: man ls # standard version man -M /usr/man/tahoe ls man -M /usr/man/sysVr3.1 ls man -M /usr/man/sun ls I've got my system set up that way, and I find it pretty convenient. They're not all available in the same print-out, but think that's ok. Now, I've also got things set so you can tell which tree the man page come from at a glance (path as displayed by pager, as well as headers that boldly state which set it's from using per-tree -man [nt]roff macros) and so you can get at a tree more easily from the command line, such as with `man tahoe ls', for example. While not all man programs give you quite all this fluff :-), as long as you have one that groks a MANPATH, you should be able to do much of this. --tom -- "Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el? Now he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen )