Man – How to Directly Display a Man Page

man

I'm writing a man page for a program that I am packaging. How can I display the manpage file that I created, to check if it's all right? Is there a way to pass my file directly to the man command instead of having it search the installed manpages by name?

I tried doing things like man myprog.1 and man < myprog.1 but in both cases I got an error saying that the man page could not be found.

Best Answer

man has an option to read a local file: -l

-l, --local-file

Activate `local' mode. Format and display local manual files instead of searching through the system's manual collection. Each manual page argument will be interpreted as an nroff source file in the correct format. No cat file is produced.

If '-' is listed as one of the arguments, input will be taken from stdin. When this option is not used, and man fails to find the page required, before displaying the error message, it attempts to act as if this option was supplied, using the name as a filename and looking for an exact match.

So you can preview your work in progress with:

man -l /path/to/manfile.1

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TCPDump Man Page – How to Read and Understand Options

By convention, the brackets indicate something that is optional. So you can run tcpdump, or tcpdump -c 3 -i eth0, or tcpdump -c 3 -r /path/to/file, etc. Also, unless explicitly indicated, options can be used in any order, so you can run tcp -i eth0 -c 3, etc.

Most commands allow options to be clustered when they use a single letter. For example, tcpdump -AX is equivalent to tcpdump -A -X. The manual groups all options that don't take arguments to make the presentation shorter: [ -Abd ] would be a shortcut for [ -A ] [ -b ] [ -d ], etc.

The synopsis is just a summary. Read the “description” or “options” section to see what each option does and what the word after each option can be replaced with.

For example, tcpdmp -nnvvXSs 1514 is a shorter equivalent of tcpdump -n -n -v -v -X -s -s 1514, and means:

-n: don't do name resolution. Repeating this option has no additional effect.
-v: causes tcpdump to print out more stuff. Repeating this option causes it to print even more stuff.
-X adds a dump of the content of each packet to the output.
-S causes absolute TCP sequence numbers to be printed.
-s 1514 causes only the first 1514 bytes of each packet to be captured.

Piping a man page on MacOS into an editor

You can pass open the -f flag to have it read the contents from stdin and open them in the text editor, which makes it usable in a pipeline.

So something like this should do what you want:

man somepage | col -b | open -tf

Best Answer

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Piping a man page on MacOS into an editor

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