topic Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage in Operating System - HP-UX

just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

rightbrain — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:41:46 GMT

How can I show a very brief (less than one line) descriptor of a particular command and very brief (one line or less) descriptors of the various options. Each man page for a particular command is several pages and I really could do without it. Usage data would be good to have too but I don't need a book where a line will do. Any thoughts on this?

I wrote this question on experts exchange and they came up with a complicated command to parse the information I needed that I could alias for each system if need be.

If there is a better approach, I would love to know about it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

Patrick Wallek — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:53:33 GMT

As far as I know, there is no easy way to do this.

If you look at 'man man' there are very few options to the man command itself.

Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

James R. Ferguson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:04:04 GMT

Hi:

Well, this gives a summary (albeit without each option's description):

# man command|col -b|awk '/NAME/,/DESCRIPTION/'

...replace 'command' with whatever you want summarized.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

TTr — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:29:46 GMT

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Misc/woman-3.0/

I have not used it but it claims to come with "apropos" and "whatis" which is what you need.

Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

Dennis Handly — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:13:47 GMT

>JRF: man command|col -b|awk '/NAME/,/DESCRIPTION/'

And pipe it to rmnl(1) to remove blank lines.

Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

Hein van den Heuvel — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:04:05 GMT

>> I wrote this question on experts exchange and they came up with a complicated command to parse the information I needed that I could alias for each system if need be.

Too bad you did not share the details.

Parsing man output is not hard, but not trivial either due to its 'stuttering' trying to 'overstrike' the key words.

For example, the line with ' SYNOPSIS looks like:
$ man awk| awk 'NR==12' | od -c
... S \b S \b S \b S Y \b Y \b Y \b Y N

So any matching looks ugly.

Here is an AWK solution, which you probably should put in a script or alias of ease of use:

$ COMMAND=awk
$ man $COMMAND 2>/dev/null | awk 'x {x=0;print $0} /S\bSY/ {x=1} / -\b-/'

awk [-Ffs] [-v var=value] [program | -f progfile ...] [file ...]
-F fs Specify regular expression used to separate
-f progfile Specify an awk program file. Up to 100 program
-v var=value Cause var=value assignment to occur before the

Using perl:

$ man $COMMAND 2>/dev/null | perl -ne '$p and print and $p=0; $p++ if /S.SY/; print if /^\s+-.-/'

or perl hiding the IFfy parts...

$ man tail 2>/dev/null | perl -ne '$p and print and $p=0; $p=/S.SY/; /^\s+-.-/ and print'

or perl picking up the command as argument for easy scripts / command line edit:

perl -e '$c=shift; foreach (qx(man $c 2>/dev/null)){if ($p){$p=0;print} $p++ if /S.SY/;print if /^\s+-.-/}'

so many ways...

:-)

hth,
Hein.

Re: just the option descriptors without all the man page garbage

Dennis Handly — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:21:34 GMT

>Hein: but not trivial either due to its 'stuttering' trying to 'overstrike' the key words.

As shown in JRF's fragment, "col -b" removes that stuff.