Way to search manpages for typical use scenario

command linemansearch

I have a relatively small brain, so there is a limit to what I can store up there. I have been using Linux semi-pro-amateur for a few years and still I am amazed at how little commands I know.

Simple stuff like "how do I list all my partitions in a terminal" will launch a 15 minute DuckDuckGo-hunt.

I am taking a stand! It ends today!

So, is there a way to search manpages for stuff like "list partitions" and getting something like:

$ man-search list partitions

Results for "list partitions"
-----------------------------

df - list drives with size or something
du - list directory usage

I think I already know the answer, but … maybe you can suggest a quicker way to find the utility I need when I need it.

Thanks!

Best Answer

I think what most closely fits what you're looking for is apropos (a.k.a. man -k), which will search the one-line descriptions preceding every manpage. If you want to search through whole manpages, at least man-db supports man -K, which does exactly this (man-db is the man implementation used on at least Debian derivatives by default).

IIRC, man -K is rather well supported on Linux man implementations, but using man-db would be highly recommended for the -db part: man-db indexes manpages in a much more efficient way which makes man -K at lot faster.

Related Solutions

Man Pages – Full Text Search Guide

By using the command man man we can see that we have two options.

   -k     Equivalent to apropos.

   -K     Search  for  the  specified  string in *all* man pages. Warning:
          this is probably very slow!  It  helps  to  specify  a  section.
          (Just  to  give  a  rough idea, on my machine this takes about a
          minute per 500 man pages.)

This is on a RHEL 5 system

Manpages for the kindle

To convert every man page to pdf I did man -k . > temp. I created a temp file and a script named file.sh:

#! /bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
    to_pdf=$(which ps2pdf)
    if [ -z "$to_pdf" ] ; then
    to_pdf=$(which pstopdf)
    fi
    name="$1"
    case "$to_pdf"  in
        *pstopdf) man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" -i -o "$fname.pdf" ;;
        *ps2pdf)  man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" - "$name.pdf" ;;
        *)        man -t "$name" > "$fname.ps"
    esac
    exit $?
fi
echo "Wrong number of parameters"
exit 1

I wrote a python file pythonfile.py

import os
f=open("temp","r")
for i in f:
    c="bash file.sh "+str(i)
    os.system(c)`

Then I did

python pythonfile.py

This will create a pdf for every man page separately inside your working directory.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Man Pages – Full Text Search Guide

Manpages for the kindle

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