Full list of tput options

documentationmantput

I wanted to hide the cursor, and I was aware of tput command. I did search its man page. On searching the Internet, I found

$ tput civis  # to hide the cursor
$ tput cnorm  # to bring back the cursor

These work perfectly, but these options are not mentioned anywhere in the man page.

Where are they officially documented?

Best Answer

The tput command uses terminfo (from man tput):

tput [-Ttype] capname [parms ... ]

(…)

For a complete list of capabilities and the capname associated with each, see terminfo(5).

(…)

capname
indicates the capability from the terminfo database. When termcap support is compiled in, the termcap name for the capability is also accepted.

The civis and cnorm are documented in terminfo's man page:

   cursor_invisible              civis      vi        make cursor invisi‐
                                                      ble
   cursor_normal                 cnorm      ve        make cursor appear
                                                      normal (undo
                                                      civis/cvvis)

In general, when you don't know which man page describes a particular command, you can search for it. In this case, I found the above by running man -K civis.

Related Solutions

How to view differences between the man pages for different versions of the same program

Man pages, once changed to a human-readable form, are text files that you can diff with whatever tool that suits you. Here are two examples, as two bash functions, for two tools: diff and vimdiff. Adapt them to your favorite tool.

With vimdiff:

vimdiff_man() { vimdiff -R <(man --manpath="/old/path/to/man" "$1") <(man "$1"); }

With diff, side by side, adjusted to your screen width:

diff_man() (
    width="${COLUMNS:-80}"
    export MANWIDTH=$((width / 2 - 2))
    diff -y -W"$width" <(man --manpath="/old/path/to/man" "$1") <(man "$1") | less
)

In each function, I'm diffing between two pseudo files <(...), each of which containing the result of the man command between parentheses (this is bash's Process Substitution).

/old/path/to/man is the directory hierarchy containing your old manual pages. It is expected to have the same secondary man levels man1, man2, ... as your main manual directory (probably /usr/share/man). Change it to fit your needs.

Usage:

diff_man sshd_config
vimdiff_man sshd_config

How to search a pattern containing hyphens inside man pages

man -K searches the source code of the manual pages, not their rendered form (as displayed by man). Hyphens are encoded \-, so you need to search for that:

man -s1 -Kw 'mark\-mo'

Yes, this is rather obscure. The man man page mentions, in the description of the -K option, that

Note that this searches the sources of the manual pages, not the rendered text, and so may include false positives due to things like comments in source files. Searching the rendered text would be much slower.

but using this correctly involves knowing the source representation of the text you’re searching for.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to view differences between the man pages for different versions of the same program

How to search a pattern containing hyphens inside man pages

Related Question