Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!ucbcad!pasteur!ucbvax!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hpda!hpdslab!hpiacla!marki
From: marki@hpiacla.HP.COM (Mark Ikemoto)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: online notebook requested
Message-ID: <3600005@hpiacla.HP.COM>
Date: 15 Jan 88 05:16:37 GMT
Organization: HP Indus. Appl. Center, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 44

I am looking for a tool.  Please read on... 

During my continuing learning process with Unix I have come across
bits of information about Unix that I would have liked to have stored
away, on-line, in my own personal data base/notebook for later recall.
Such a tool would be useful for keeping at my fingertips information
that was gleaned through laborious searching of the man pages or
information not even documented in the man pages at all.  You could
also use it for names-and-addresses, recipes, restaurant
recommendations, etc.

For example, as I'm typing away on the terminal and I need to do a
subdirectory-to-subdirectory copy, I ask myself, what was that
dang-blasted option for cp to do this and how do I specify the subdir
names (e.g., ./tools/* ? , ./tools/ ? , ./tools ?).  I type:

          % man2 cp

and receive something like the following on my terminal screen:

          .\" keywords: cp copy subdir 

          cp -r subdir1 subdir2
              Subdir copying is tricky if subdir1 is your current
              working directory, or subdir2 is your current working
              directory, or if you live above the 39th parallel and
              it's the weekend.

          .\" end-of-entry


Basically, it's like the grep command searching a file for keywords,
but instead of returning just one line per match, it returns 
several lines until some marker is reached.  One nice thing is that
you could set up  man2  to access the notebooks of other users (willing
users!) on your system or other systems.  Kind of a distributed
intelligence with random thoughts.

I've thought of this tool but haven't had the time to implement it yet.
Does anyone out there have it, its equivalent, or something better
(hopefully for free).


Mark