Ubuntu – How to search for all the man files that contain certain keyword

manpagesearch

I want to learn how to search for a file by giving the content within it as a parameter. I can then apply the solution to search for commands contributed by Richard Stallman (through man pages).

Best Answer

This command will show you the filenames of man files that contain the keyword Stallman:

zgrep -l Stallman /usr/share/man/man?/*

Output in my 15.10 begins with:

/usr/share/man/man1/cat.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/comm.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/ctags.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/ctags.emacs24.1.gz

Then, you can browse as usual, with man cat, man comm, etc.

Related Solutions

Unity – Can Unity Dash Search for Content Within Files?

Install recoll-lens (as of 26 March 2012 this works only for 11.10):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:recoll-backports/recoll-1.15-on
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install recoll-lens recoll

Run recoll (open dash, type recoll and there you are), and create an index (it might take some time) - the app will ask for it itself when first run. (In preferences, you may want to set it up so that it reindexes your files regularly or on the fly.) Then logout and login and you have a new lens that provides full-text search. It is accessible from general Dash as well (after hitting super).

Information taken from http://www.webupd8.org/2012/03/recoll-lens-full-text-search-unity-lens.html

How to Download Official Man Pages from Ubuntu for Offline Viewing

The man pages are usually get installed with software. So, If you install a software with manpages, the manpages will be automatically installed.

Manual pages in a Web browser

By installing man2html

You can install man2html package to your computer to view the manual pages in your favorite browser:
```
sudo apt-get install man2html
```
By installing doc-central

There is another tool which view manpages in browser, it is called doccentral. You can install it with the following command:
```
sudo apt-get install doc-central
```

Downloading manual pages:

You can download the latest manual pages from here. The size was also included in the page

Manual pages in PDF !:

Yes, you can even get the manual pages in pdf file format. for example, if you want to generate manual page for man the command will be :

man -t man | ps2pdf - man.pdf.

This will generate a manual page, named man.pdf in the current directory of the terminal. replace man with your desired one, such as grep or apt-get etc.

Info pages in browser.

Though it is not asked in the question, I include it as general reference.

You can also have the GNU info pages (which are more elaborate and helpful) in a web browser by installing info2www package. The command is below:

sudo apt-get install info2www

Hope this will help