Hi, this likely isn't quite as bad as you seem to fear.
John Gardner wrote on Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:01:29PM +1000: > I should ask, what's the most reliable way of running `man -a -w`? > I thought this was universal to `man` implementations, It is, see http://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html#w It has been available since AT&T Unix v7, consequently in BSD since 3BSD, in Eaton man, man-1.6, man-db, ... - so for practical purposes, everywhere. > but Solaris told me otherwise. That is very strange. Given that Solaris is derived from Sys V Unix (which had it) and from CSRG BSD (which also had it), i have no idea how they managed to break such a simple option. > illumos uses `man -w` to update the `makewhatis` database, What a terrible idea. Illumos is derived from Solaris. So probably, they mistakenly considered the option free because Solaris already broke it earlier, and reused it for a different purpose, failing to do the required research first. They should probably fix that mistake. > and this is part of what killed my first attempt at finishing Roff.js. I suspect you will get away with using -w if you merely implement a workaround for Solaris and Solaris-derived systems like Illumos: if man -w fails, use man -l with a bit of postprocessing instead. Of course, do not use -l otherwise: It is wildly non-portable, and for this purpose, purely a Solaris idiosyncracy: http://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html#l Yours, Ingo
