|
Grex > Jelly > #35: The Unix Document Preparation item | |
|
| Author |
Message |
cross
|
|
The Unix Document Preparation item
| 
Sep 17 00:12 UTC 2006 |
This is the Unix document preparation item. Ever wondered how man pages are
written, or how to use troff to produce a nicely formated paper? Or how to
use TeX, LaTeX, or Docbook? Ask here.
|
| 11 responses total. |
other
|
|
response 1 of 11:
|
Sep 18 20:07 UTC 2006 |
Here's a UNIX documentation question. Why is there no short guide to
every executable's primary function distributed with most variants in an
easily locatable place? By short guide, I mean a one line description
of the basic purpose of each of the tons of commands/utilities included
in a distro, combined in a single document.
|
twenex
|
|
response 2 of 11:
|
Sep 18 20:38 UTC 2006 |
Because a one line description of <foo> can be obtained by entering the
command "whatis <foo>". A one line description of all manpages whose
associated commands relate to <foo> can be obtained with "man -k <foo>", or
its popular synonym, "apropos <foo>"
|
twenex
|
|
response 3 of 11:
|
Sep 18 21:05 UTC 2006 |
The commands work by searching the "NAME" field of manpages, which also
contain a one line description.
|
cross
|
|
response 4 of 11:
|
Sep 19 03:36 UTC 2006 |
(It would be nice to have an index; the whatis database on some systems is
a flat file and can serve this purpose. Or, you could write a script to
extract the information from the man pages themselves....)
|
twenex
|
|
response 5 of 11:
|
Sep 19 15:09 UTC 2006 |
To clarify: on many (most?) systems the whatis command takes info from a flat
file, but this information is extracted by the makewhatis command from the
NAME field of manpages.
|
other
|
|
response 6 of 11:
|
Sep 19 21:12 UTC 2006 |
I guess what I'm looking for is more a browseable list of the outputs of
'whatis <foo>' for all <foo> on the system. I have a vast quantity of
executables in various directories on my computer, and if I want to look
and see if one exists that does a specific thing, or just look through a
list a see what some of the things are that tools have been written to
do, I don't know how to do that.
|
cross
|
|
response 7 of 11:
|
Sep 20 04:10 UTC 2006 |
Regarding #5; Unfortunately, under OpenBSD, it appears to be a Berkeley DB
format file. I suppose that's for fast searching, but it makes using grep
on it sorta impossible....
Regarding #6; On grex, there was a "listcommand" or "listcommands" script that
did just that. I re-wrote it for grexsoft, but that never get put on after
the last upgrade, so it's probably back to original. Here's my version:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $path = $ENV{'PATH'};
if (@ARGV) {
$path = join ':', @ARGV;
}
print "Searching command directories.\n";
my %files = ();
foreach my $dir (split(/:/, $path)) {
next unless $dir;
print "Processing $dir...";
opendir(DIR, $dir) || next;
while (my $file = readdir(DIR)) {
next unless -x "$dir/$file" && ! -d _;
$files{$file}++;
}
closedir DIR;
print "Done\n";
}
print "Grex Unix Commands\n";
foreach my $file (sort keys %files) {
my $whatis = `whatis -- $file`;
$whatis =~ s/.*(not found|nothing appropriate).*\n//;
$whatis =~ s/^[^-]*-\s*([^\n]*)(\n.*)*/ - $1/;
print $file, $whatis, "\n";
}
More of the grexsoft tools can be found in my home directory, under
~cross/grexsoft.
|
other
|
|
response 8 of 11:
|
Sep 20 13:13 UTC 2006 |
i don't know perl, so i'm not sure why, but when i ran that script on my
machine, i got a long list of '<foo> - -: unknown option'
|
cross
|
|
response 9 of 11:
|
Sep 20 22:15 UTC 2006 |
What machine are you running it on? It would appear that the whatis command
on that machine doesn't understand the "--" notation (which is supposed to
mean, "halt argument list processing" - this is useful if a command begins
with a -).
|
other
|
|
response 10 of 11:
|
Sep 21 03:01 UTC 2006 |
PowerBook G4, OS X 10.4.7
Based on your comment, I took the '--' out of the line which generates
the output, and it works now.
There are some interesting looking items which have no explanation, such
as 'zipcloak' and 'testrb' and 'seg_hack'.
|
cross
|
|
response 11 of 11:
|
Sep 22 00:53 UTC 2006 |
Hmm; I think that code works okay on my iBook running OS X 10.4.7, as well.
Well, maybe not; I just tried it and it gave me the same error. I guess you
can't do whatis for a command that starts with a -.
testrb is a the Ruby Test::Unit runner. zipcloak has something to do with
zipfiles; I assume it is intended to encrypt zip files, but I just get an
error message when I run it on my iBook. I'm not sure what seg_hack is; I
don't appear to have it on my system.
|