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From: grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Manual pages located in NON-STANDARD places in Ultrix
Message-ID: <1991Jun10.230854.23545@colorado.edu>
Date: 10 Jun 91 23:08:54 GMT
References: <1991Jun10.214332.11539@leland.Stanford.EDU>
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In-Reply-To: rsingh@elaine4.Stanford.EDU's message of Mon, 10 Jun 91 21:43:32 GMT
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If you have 'perl' installed, you might try perl-man.tar.Z via anon
ftp from foobar.colorado.edu. Here's the feature list.

Features include but are not limited to:

    *   almost always faster than standard man (try 'man me')

    *	take much less diskspace for catpages

    *	supports per-tree tmac macros
    
    *	compressed man and cat files

    *	user-definable man path via $MANPATH or -M optoin
    
    *  $MANPATH autoconfigged based on $PATH if not set

    *   user-definable section search order via -S or $MANSECT.  Thus
	programmers can get stty(3) before stty(1).
    
    *	$PAGER support

    *	show all the places you would find a man page (-w option)
	and in what order.

    *   display all available man page on a topic (-a option)
    
    *   no limits on what subsections go where (if you want to add 7x, ok)

    *   support for multi-char sections like man1m/*.1m or manavs/*.avs

    *   man -K for regexp apropos

    *   grep through all the man pages in $MANPATH

    *   section and subsection indexing for long man pages

    *   support for alternate architectures docs on same machine

    *	ability to run man on a local file 

    *	ability to easily troff (or preview) a man page

    *	recognizes embedded filter directives for tbl and eqn

    *	does the right thing for man tree that don't have DBM whatis files

    *   support for connecting online problem reports to right man page
   
    *   there's an extended usage message (man -U) for further help
	and to show current defaults.


Here are some features of this version of makewhatis:

    *	it's faster.

    *	tries hard to make pretty output, stripping troff directives.

    *   doesn't blow up on more files in a man directory 
	than the shell will glob.  

    *   accepts troff string macros for the dashes in the
	the NAME section.

    *   prints a diagnostic for a malformed NAME section.

    *   detects linked (hard, soft, or via .so) man pages

    *   finds *all* references in the NAME section.

    *   recognizes MH's man macros (and .Sh from lwall).

    *   many other things that makewhatis used to do wrong

Here are some supporting utilities that are included:

    *   catman -- new version that groks compressed files

    *   catwhatis -- display the whatis databases

    * 	straycats -- find cat pages with no man page ancestor

    *   countman -- find how many man pages you can get at

    *   cfman -- find bad SEE ALSO references in man pages