How to capture the output of top and normal text file of "man ls"?

[Zhang Zhao gui]

When I ran top >f1 and key in q to exit, I found that
f1 is very messy and contains garbage. It looks like
the same as when I ran "man ls >f2" and used vi to
edit it. "vi f2" also got a lot of garbage, Is there
any solution to solve this kind of problem?

[Fernando Pena]

Yes , one possible option :

# cd /usr/man/man1.Z
# cp ls.1 file.1
# mv file.1 file.1.Z
# uncompress file.1
# nroff file.1 > file.2

# vi file.2 <-- ASCII file

Goodbay !

[Zhang Zhao gui]

But file.2 is no longer the same as the output of ls. In addition, comparing
to the original, some information are lost. I can't find the following info.
ls(1)
NAME
SYNOPSIS
ls [-abcdefgilmnopqrstuxACFLR1] [names]

l [ls_options] [names]
ll [ls_options] [names]
lsf [ls_options] [names]
lsr [ls_options] [names]
lsx [ls_options] [names]


As for the output of top command, even when I ran
top -d 1 >f1, I still got garbage when I 'vi' it,
I want to make use of this info in my script, how
can that be done?

[Ivan Coenegrachts_1]

Yes, there is a solution ...

# top > f1
q
# cat f1 | col -b > f2
# vi f2

-> also works with man-pages.

Best Regards,
Ivan.

[Cheryl Griffin_1]

There is and undocumented feature with top, which is to use the -f option to
write top output to a file.
You can specify any filename.

# top -f /tmp/topfile

You can use this feature in conjunction with other top options as documented on
the man page for top(1).

[Zhang Zhao gui]

The command "cat f1|col -b >f2" generated an empty file f2 on my server.