[aklug] Re: Geeky Topic of the Week: man pages

From: <choward@indicium.us>
Date: Fri Jul 09 2010 - 14:48:30 AKDT

On Fri, 9 Jul 2010 13:48:01 -0800, Matt Grimm <matt.t.grimm@gmail.com>
wrote:
> apropos will search the name and description of each program's man page.
>
> man -K will search for a string in all man page content (but "man man"
> warns that this is very slow).
>
> m.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Christopher Howard <choward@indicium.us>
> wrote:
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>> Let me say, starting off, that this topic is proffered to the list
>> primarily to spark discussion and flame wars, rather than provide an
>> actual commitment to productivity. (Thereby making this a truly geeky
>> discussion according to the usual orthodox qualifications.)
>>
>> So, most of us have had this experience, have we not?
>>
>>  1. We want to do XYZ in Linux
>>  2. We Google XYZ. (No satisfying answer.)
>>  3. We make a post to a Linux forum about XYZ.
>>  4. A day later, somebody replies to the thread with an answer like so:
>>
>> You !@#!@$ idiot! RTFM! Any idiot can see that the answer is on line
457
>> of the XYZ-UTIL(1) man page. Stop being a lazy #$!@# and do you
homework
>> first!
>>
>> And we are left thinking "I didn't even know there was an XYZ-UTIL man
>> page," or "Jeepers, I read the XYZ-UTIL man page, but somehow I missed
>> that note in line 457."
>>
>> So, maybe we need to write some kind of man page search engine, which
>> would allow you to "Google" all the man page content on your system? Or
>> maybe the man page system itself is flawed?
>>
>> - --
>> Christopher Howard
>> http://indicium.us
>> http://theologia.indicium.us
>>
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>>

So, thus far we have apropros KEYWORD (man -k KEYWORD) which looks for a
keyword in a database. Or we have man -K STRING which does a non-indexed
search for an exact string.

Helpful, of course. But it would also be cool if you could search for "how
to find out why the printer isn't doing anything" and get the top five most
relevant results.
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Received on Fri Jul 9 14:48:38 2010

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