Terminal Tip: Output man pages as plain text with col

xSmurf -- thanks for the tip! If I had actually, oh, read the man page for man, I'd have seen the -t option. It was, ultimately, the -f option to open that was tripping me up, though.

Very nice tips ... thank you. :)

and then there's Bwana, which lets you type man:whatever in your browser and get a nicely formatted man page.

A much nicer solution is

man -t man | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app

which will render the man page as a nicely formatted pdf and open it in Preview. I have it as a function in my .bash_profile:

pman() {
/usr/bin/man -t ${1} | /usr/bin/open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app
}

(I'm using a lot of HTML here, so I hope this comes through OK.)

My preference for easy readability and printing (if so desired) is, for example:


$ groff -mandoc -Tps /usr/share/man/man1/example.1 > example.ps && open -a example.ps


This will convert the man page to PostScript, then open it in Preview where it can be viewed and/or saved as PDF and/or printed. (Unfortunately, the pipeline straight into open -a Preview doesn’t work, so saving it to a file is required as an intermediate step.)

The trick, if you want HTML documentation instead, is to replace -Tps with -Thtml.

I’ve written scripts which accomplish these tasks, actually:
man2ps:
#!/bin/sh

MANSECT='[1|8|2|3|4|5|6|7|9|0p|1p|3p|tcl|n|l|p|o]' # from man.conf
CMD=$1
CMPATH=`man -w $CMD`
PSFILE=`basename $CMPATH | sed -e 's/.${MANSECT}/.ps/'`
MANPSDIR=$HOME/Documents/manpages

if [[ ! -d $MANPSDIR ]]; then
# make a special directory for PS man pages at /Users/<username>/Documents/manpages
mkdir -p $MANPSDIR
fi

/usr/bin/groff -mandoc -Tps $CMPATH > ${MANPSDIR}/${PSFILE}
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
/usr/bin/open -a Preview ${MANPSDIR}/${PSFILE}
else
echo "Unable to convert manpage for $CMD to PS" >&2
fi`



Usage: man2ps command

If you pipe man into groff, you can also save the man page as HTML, DVI, or PS.

So:

groff -T html -mandoc `man -w man` > man.1.html
open man.1.html

(I use the man -w command to find the actual man file in question, rather than going and finding it myself in /usr/share or wherever).

Handy, every once in a while.

Or you could just use a man page viewer application like ManOpen which you can copy from and paste into TextEdit (though with a decent viewer like ManOpen I don't see the point of needing TextEdit).