Newsgroups: comp.archives
Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!ox.com!msen.com!emv
From: jwe@che.utexas.edu (John W. Eaton)
Subject: [gnu] Re: GNU man(ual)
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.102653.22245@ox.com>
Followup-To: gnu.misc.discuss
Keywords: man GNU
Sender: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)
Reply-To: jwe@andy.che.utexas.edu (John W. Eaton)
Organization: University of Texas at Austin
References: <1991Mar13.102614@arp.anu.edu.au> <45521@ut-emx.uucp>
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1991 10:26:53 GMT
Approved: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)
X-Original-Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss

Archive-name: unix/man/jwe-man/1991-03-13
Archive: andy.che.utexas.edu:/pub/man-1.0.tar.Z [128.83.162.5]
Original-posting-by: jwe@che.utexas.edu (John W. Eaton)
Original-subject: Re: GNU man(ual)
Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)

In article <1991Mar13.102614@arp.anu.edu.au> gustav@arp.anu.edu.au
(Zdzislaw Meglicki) writes:

> Is there a GNU version of UNIX program "man"? I have to live at
> present with very antiquated version of 4.2BSD man. It does not know
> about MANPATH, hence I'm forced to throw all GNU man entries into
> mann. That's most inconvenient. I'd rather have a separate man
> directory altogether for GNU, X, and various other large systems.

As far as I know, GNU man does not exist and I would guess it's not a
high priority item since it seems that the goal is to have all GNU
documentation written in TeXInfo.

Other than the BSD version of man, I know of two other
implementations -- mine and the competition's :-).

I wrote mine because I was annoyed by the version of man distributed
with Ultrix and couldn't find anything much better.  It understands
MANPATH and PAGER environment variables and knows a few other tricks
that the standard Ultrix/BSD man doesn't.  You can retrieve a copy via
anonymous ftp from andy.che.utexas.edu (128.83.162.5) in the directory
pub.

There is also a very complete implementation of man in perl by Tom
Christiansen.  It is available from tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
(128.146.8.60) in the directory pub/perl/scripts/tchrist.

--
John W. Eaton
jwe@che.utexas.edu
Department of Chemical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin