Questions tagged [man]
man - format and display the on-line manual pages ("on-line" meaning “on the computer”, as opposed to “on paper”, not “on the Internet”)
642 questions
-3
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1
answer
96
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bash -n is a not documented in manpages or info documents [closed]
Even though bash -n is a valid and widely used option, some manpages don't clearly document it in the bash options section, even though it is implemented. It's also not in the GNU Bash Reference ...
12
votes
2
answers
904
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Debian Bookworm always sets `COLUMNS` to be a little less than the actual terminal width
On Debian Bookworm, the $COLUMNS bash variable is always a little smaller than the actual terminal width. This leaves a little space on the right side whenever I run a program that runs through less, ...
8
votes
1
answer
854
views
Customize the man command's status prompt to show percentage read
I like the man command's status prompt to be customized. The default as picked from its own man page is like this,
Manual page name(sec) line x
But, having it show me the percentage of contents read ...
1
vote
1
answer
138
views
Manpage of 'regex(7)', from the shell
Today I have read two answers about which regular expressions are supported by less: Where is less search pattern reference?
Kusalananda mentioned re_format(7) and referenced its manpage as man 7 ...
6
votes
1
answer
350
views
Is groff ignoring `.nh` command?
For a man page written in POD (perlpod) I had the effect that the SYNOPSIS was left-adjusted on the text terminal, but the PostScript output (read: troff) adjusted the text to both borders.
So I tried ...
1
vote
1
answer
41
views
How do I append an option argument to the flag without spaces?
I am writing a program manual in mdoc(7). One example of my programs has this synopsis:
parsrc.sh [-lf<s>] [CSV_file]
Taken from ShellShoccar-jpn/Parsrs/parsrc.sh
For example if you run parsrc....
4
votes
1
answer
265
views
Word split between two lines is not found in man pages search
I'm on Linux Mint 21 (Ubuntu based). Just noted man pages internal search (/) does not find a word if split between two lines (the word is whole in the source of the page, displayed with a hyphen and ...
0
votes
0
answers
76
views
How to speed up full man DB search?
man-db's man --global-apropos/man -k is slow. man --global-apropos --where RestrictNamespaces takes around 30 seconds on a fairly beefy laptop with an NVMe. Compare to find $(manpath | tr : '\n') -...
1
vote
1
answer
71
views
Is it possible to create a alias to a man page?
On my macOS system I have installed gcc-14 with Homebrew. On a shell that has access to the files, I can open a man page for the GCC compiler with man gcc-14.
I would like to write a script that ...
0
votes
1
answer
607
views
How does the credit system work in pam_pwquality?
Something has been really bugging me in he manual for the pam module pwquality (see man pwquality.conf).
I quote:
minlen
Minimum acceptable size for the new password (plus one if ...
1
vote
1
answer
149
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coreutils man pages are missing in WSL Fedora
I installed Fedora 39 on WSL,
but I ran into some issues when I tried using man.
When I used the man command, I was getting no manual entry for ...
I had to remove tsflags=nodocs from /etc/dnf/dnf....
1
vote
1
answer
354
views
GREP error: warning: cannot select font 'i'
I am in the process of learning the usage of iscsiadm and somehow I noticed a strange behavior of grep.
Attempting to run the following grep command man iscsiadm | grep "aia" results in ...
0
votes
1
answer
34
views
Where is "--localcacert" in Puppet man page?
I am new to Puppet. We have a command and it uses the --localcacert option. The command looks like this:
puppet agent -t --localcacert <path to CA cert> --ca_server <CA server hostname> --...
0
votes
0
answers
433
views
How to Identify column names in terminal commands
Sometimes its useful to select/de-select specific columns from a command output data, but the columns are not always listed by name in the manpages. How can we find the names?
For example
Running two ...
6
votes
4
answers
2k
views
How do I add line numbers to the man page?
How can I add line numbers to man pages or info pages in Linux?
I want to use line numbers to navigate in man pages.
I can write the man page in a file and then open it with Vim, but is there a better ...