Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!bloom-beacon!snorkelwacker!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!mailrus!cornell!calvin.spp.cornell.edu!richard
From: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: man(1) for MSDOS?
Summary: New version of help coming soon
Message-ID: <1990Feb4.012838.26057@calvin.spp.cornell.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 90 01:28:38 GMT
References: <1990Feb1.175125.922@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <1456@raybed2.UUCP>
Reply-To: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Organization: Cornell Space Plasma Physics Group
Lines: 46

In article <1456@raybed2.UUCP> rgc@raybed2.UUCP (RICK CARLE) writes:
>
>I think that, to run u*ix-style man, you'd need nroff, which must be huge.
>But, there's a public domain program named "help," written by Wolf Paul
>and improved by John Plocher and most recently by Richard Brittain, that
>might provide the features you need.  It's extendable (although I've
>never tried it) by adding "helpfile"s via an environment variable.

	I'm glad this is proving useful to someone.  I'll take this 
opportunity to mention that I have a new interactive "front end" for it
that I have been holding for a while until binaries start flowing again
in c.b.i.p.  It behaves as before if a specific argument is given, and
pops up a selection window for interactive browsing if no argument is
given.  I designed the interface as a copy of the 4DOS help, but running
external program %PAGER% instead of a built in pager.  If anyone is
interested, the helpfile which comes with 4DOS can be converted to my
format pretty easily if you have an editor that is reasonably smart about
macros (actually MKS toolkit helpfile format to give credit where due).

However, the real impetus for this help program was to consolidate lots
of little help files into one (or a small number) and provide an easy
way to extract entries and implement an apropos facility.  I have been
thinking of writing a general "man" lookalike for a while to handle the
long online manuals that come with many packages.  What I would like
to see is:
	-  invoke a command or commands to display a file based on the extension
	   such as .Z - zcat, .NRO - nroff, .DOC - cat
	- 	pipe the resulting output through PAGER
	-  search in a directory hierarchy, though not neccessarily as extensive
	   as most unix /usr/man/..... systems

Using 4DOS allows me to specify that pipe files be placed in my ram disk,
which makes regular use of pipe operations much faster and more feasible
than disk-based pipes.

I'm currently using a man(1) which I think I got from simtel20, written
by David L Rick (1986).  It is very useful, and allows searching in 
a user-specified list of directories, and display via a user specified
pager.  The entries must all be straight text and end with .DOC however,
and cannot be extended to handle compressed or unformatted files.


Richard Brittain,                   School of Elect. Eng.,  Upson Hall   
                                    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
ARPA: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu	
UUCP: {uunet,uw-beaver,rochester,cmcl2}!cornell!calvin!richard