manpages are your friend-but have you ever tired to print one ?

If you've been here at LQ for any length of time, and posted a question or two, then there's a strong possibility that someone will have suggested that you read the manpage for whatever.

For example, if you open a terminal window, as at the $ prompt, type man man you should see the man page for man - it tells you about man pages.

Now, if like me, you hate reading complex, unfamiliar, formatted documents from a screen, then once you know which man page you want/need to read,

in a terminal type

man <name> | col -b > ~/manpage.txt

Just remember to change the <name> part to the command or whatever you need to read. If you then look in your home directory, you should have a copy of that man page, called manpage.txt

You should then be able to print it out. Try it, with maybe man ls | col -b > ~/manpage.txt or maybe man dmesg | col -b > ~/manpage.txt

If you need more than one, you can change the command a little so the output txt message has a different name, in a moment of childishness I tried man dmesg | col -b > ~/dogshit.txt and of course, that produced the output of man dmesg as a text file called dogshit.txt

Ah, it's so much nicer to be able to read these bloody things on a piece of paper.

Maybe this might help you a little ?

regards

John

or you could bypass the redirecting to the file all-together and just pipe the output of man directly to your print spooler.

man <name_of_program> | lpr -P HP_CLJ4500_DN

Another trick if you don't want to read man pages in a console is to open konqueror and type the foloowing in the Location filed:

man:<name>

This will display the man page in konqueror where you can scroll through the entire page and find what your looking for easier. You can also print the page directly from konqueror.

Well done megaspaz and kilgoretrout,

Excellent addititions. I'm all for anything that will make things easier with documentation for newbies (Ha, that's me included). Even if only to make using existing doc's easier to read.

keep up the good work both!

regards

John