Exiting a manual

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm sure it's really easy, but I have searched on Google and on the forums and haven't found anything.

For instance, if I open the grep manual (man grep), I can't close it.
I've tried ctrl+c, ctrl+x, scrolling to the bottom of the manual.
How can I exit the manual without closing the shell?

edit: Thank you Tytalus.

2

you can quit the man pages at any time by pressing q

try h to see the full help.

the man pages are basically shunted through "more" so same syntax/command set as there.

HTH

3

FWIW -- I like to pump my man pages into vi before reading them because oftentimes
they contain code snippets and structs and what-not that I want to immediately use.
vi lets me grab specific lines and store them very nicely.

so my 'man' is actually 'mon' ( kinda Jamaican )

mon:

man $* | col -b > /tmp/man.$LOGNAME
vi /tmp/man.$LOGNAME
/bin/rm /tmp/man.$LOGNAME

or something like that...
Actually, there's a lot more to it... but that's essentially it.

4

Why do you need to read it in vi to do that? Simply copy and paste from the output of man.

5

you're right. you don't. it's just that I use vi 90% of my day...
it's just easy to search.... scroll backwards, forwards....
use the same hot-keys in "man" as I do everywhere else.
rather than switching to "more" mode.

Plus - - - on my machine - - - man uses formatting characters,
underlines, and overstrikes, ( ie. ^Hi^Hi^Hi^Hi ) where I've had problems cutting and pasting because you get all those control characters also.

Using col -b and vi eliminates that concern.

6

set your 'PAGER' to 'less' - this is more convenient.
<depending on your shell>

export PAGER=less
7

I've never know cutting (highlighting with the mouse) to capture control characters.

8

Got me there. Good one.

Like I said, it's mainly for navigation purposes, familiarity... etc...

( The control characters stay if you do something like:
man localtime > a
And then want to grab stuff that just happened to be highlighted. )

My 'mon' command also removes the page-headers and page-trailers,
so if the text you'd like to highlight happens to span on 2 pages,
you don't have to worry about that anymore.

Like in the localtime page part here:

     Declarations of all the functions and externals, and the  tm
     structure, are in the <time.h> header. The members of the tm
     structure are:

     int   tm_sec;    /* seconds after the minute - [0, 60] */
                      /* for leap seconds */
     int   tm_min;    /* minutes after the hour - [0, 59] */
     int   tm_hour;   /* hour since midnight - [0, 23] */
     int   tm_mday;   /* day of the month - [1, 31] */
     int   tm_mon;    /* months since January - [0, 11] */
     int   tm_year;   /* years since 1900 */
     int   tm_wday;   /* days since Sunday - [0, 6] */



SunOS 5.10          Last change: 27 May 2005                    2






Standard C Library Functions                            ctime(3C)



     int   tm_yday;   /* days since January 1 - [0, 365] */
     int   tm_isdst;  /* flag for alternate daylight savings time */
9

FYI, if you need your 'man' pages converted to Postscript (on Solaris):

#!/bin/ksh
# prepare a "man" page to be printed on the Postscript printer
# $1 - is "nroff"-ed "man" page - usually located on your MANPATH -
# [/usr/man/man1 man2 etc.....].
#
# The result of running this wrapper is a Postscript file placed under
# "/tmp" dirrectory with extention os ".ps". You can print this .ps
# on any Postscript printer from UNIX [if lp has been fonfigured]
# and/or transfer it to your NT print it from there.

TARGET_DIR="/tmp"
TARGET_PATH="${TARGET_DIR}/`basename ${1}`.ps"

troff -man ${1} | /usr/lib/lp/postscript/dpost > ${TARGET_PATH}

echo "\tYour converted postscript file is at ${TARGET_PATH}"