Are there any tricks/sites/methods to use the linux man command in a more convenient way ? I love commands in terminal but for some strange reason I preferred to type man in firefox then in the terminal. The output is so long and I have to scroll forever to find what I need. Also the lack of example is a headache.
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An alternative to the more proper responses might be to create a custom search word in Firefox for "man" and point it to Linux Man Pages. Then you can type man <thing> in Firefox and have it work. Still, it's worth getting used to man itself.– Jamie SchembriNov 20, 2010 at 19:46
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4 Answers
Assuming your man pager is less, you can search for regexes by using /. For example, to search for examples in man find, type /^examples. You can use page-up and page-down and other usual navigation keys to move around.
answered Nov 20, 2010 at 19:15
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Also, to repeat the search use
n;Nto do the same in the reverse direction.– cYrusNov 20, 2010 at 19:25 -
1Yep. More or less any pager you'll find these days has a search command, so learn to use it. Nov 20, 2010 at 19:40
I guess you need:
man man
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Actually
man lessis more likely to be relevant. Or typinghin less. Nov 20, 2010 at 23:39
You can try xman which is a GUI man page viewer on almost all systems. Others must exist as well.
Some Linux distros still keep info pages, which are a hypertext sort of replacement for man pages. It never got much traction, so not all commands have info pages. I never liked them personally but you may like them. Look at the info, pinfo or even tkinfo commands.
Remember that man uses nroff underneath (groff on Linux) and it can target a small subset of output types. I find postscript output useful, either with ghostview/kghostview on screen, or just dumping to a printer. I think the -t flag in most distros will dump to postscript. Or maybe the sequence -p -Tps.
answered Nov 20, 2010 at 19:53
Try installing man2html. This will allow you to browse the man pages in Firefox or whatever browser you want to use.
