🚀 go-pugleaf

From the keyboard of gustav@arp.anu.edu.au (Zdzislaw Meglicki):
:Is there a GNU version of UNIX program "man"? I have to live at present with
:very antiquated version of 4.2BSD man. It does not know about MANPATH, hence
:I'm forced to throw all GNU man entries into mann. That's most inconvenient.
:I'd rather have a separate man directory altogether for GNU, X, and various other
:large systems. I've searched fileutils and binutils and, of course, prep.ai.mit.edu,
:but there was nothing that would look like "man".

No, there isn't.  If however, you just want a version that you can use
(but not make money off of: it is copyrighted, not copylefted) then you
may retrieve a perl version from convex.com via anon ftp in the file
/pub/man.shar.Z; you'll find it to be quite fully featured; features
list follows.  

I presented this work at the LISA-IV conference and (vicariously) at the
last EUUG in Nice, France.  That paper is contained in the sharchive.
This runs on almost any architecture that has ndbm support and man pages
in source (nroff) form.  I'll mail it to you if you don't have FTP access.

--tom

Features include but are not limited to:

    *   almost always faster than standard man (try 'man me')

    *	take much less diskspace for catpages 

    *	supports per-tree tmac macros
    
    *	groks compressed man and cat files

    *	user-definable man path via $MANPATH or -M optoin
    
    *   $MANPATH autoconfigged based on $PATH if not set

    *   user-definable section search order via -S or $MANSECT.  Thus
	programmers can get stty(3) before stty(1).
    
    *	$PAGER support

    *	show all the places you would find a man page (-w option)
	and in what order.

    *   display all available man page on a topic (-a option)
    
    *   no limits on what subsections go where (if you want to add 7x, ok)

    *   support for multi-char sections like man1m/*.1m or manavs/*.avs

    *   man -K for regexp apropos

    *   grep through all the man pages in $MANPATH

    *   section and subsection indexing for long man pages

    *   support for alternate architectures docs on same machine

    *	ability to run man on a local file 

    *	ability to easily troff (or preview) a man page

    *	recognizes embedded filter directives for tbl and eqn

    *	does the right thing for man tree that don't have DBM whatis files

    *   support for connecting online problem reports to right man page

    *   has a selection menu for multiple possibilities (eg stty.1, stty.3)

    *   there's an extended usage message (man -u) for further help
	and to show current defaults.


Here are some features of this version of makewhatis:

    *	it's faster.

    *	tries hard to make pretty output, stripping troff directives.

    *   doesn't blow up on more files in a man directory 
	than the shell will glob.  

    *   accepts troff string macros for the dashes in the
	the NAME section.

    *   prints a diagnostic for a malformed NAME section.

    *   detects linked (hard, soft, or via .so) man pages

    *   finds *all* references in the NAME section.

    *   recognizes MH's man macros (and .Sh from lwall).

    *   many other things that makewhatis used to do wrong

Here are some supporting utilities that are included:

    *   catman -- new version that groks compressed files

    *   catwhatis -- display the whatis databases

    * 	straycats -- find cat pages with no man page ancestor

    *   countman -- find how many man pages you can get at

    *   cfman -- find bad SEE ALSO references in man pages