Hi John,
John Gardner wrote on Sat, Dec 01, 2018 at 05:36:25PM +1100:
> Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>> Even moderately large systems can be beautifully documented in a
>> single manual page - for example, a shell
> It's amazing how true this is. Even with massive man-pages, it's still
> easier to find what I'm looking for in less(1) by hitting the `/` key and
> typing a search string.
Even better - on OpenBSD-current, i simply type
$ man -O tag=wait ksh
and less(1) starts up like this:
wait [job ...]
Wait for the specified job(s) to finish. The exit status of wait
is that of the last specified job; if the last job is killed by a
then type ":tset" ENTER
* set exit status. In POSIX mode, the exit status of set is 0 if there
are no errors; in non-POSIX mode, the exit status is that of any
then hit just "t"
set [+-abCefhkmnpsuvXx] [+-o option] [+-A name] [--] [arg ...]
The set command can be used to set (-) or clear (+) shell
options, set the positional parameters, or set an array
Try that kind of hyperlinking with "/".
Just like https://man.openbsd.org/ksh#wait
only at the console. And no, it does *not* require the author to
say "i want an anchor here" in any special syntax. It just works
from the normal manual page markup, without doing anything special.
> It's quite literally faster than the time it takes to load
> web-based documentation (especially on my crappy connection...)
Except when using groff, of course:
schwarze@isnote $ uname -a
OpenBSD isnote.usta.de 6.4 GENERIC.MP#341 amd64
schwarze@isnote $ sysctl hw.model
hw.model=Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5300U CPU @ 2.30GHz
schwarze@isnote $ time man ksh | wc
2960 20284 165761
0m00.06s real 0m00.06s user 0m00.01s system
schwarze@unstable11s [unstable11s]:~ > uname -a
SunOS unstable11s 5.11 11.3 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise
schwarze@unstable11s [unstable11s]:~ > psrinfo -pv | tail -1
SPARC64-VII (portid 1024 impl 0x7 ver 0x91 clock 2520 MHz)
schwarze@unstable11s [unstable11s]:~ > time man ksh | wc
Reformatting page. Please Wait... done
3180 26718 227245
real 0m0.549s
user 0m0.952s
sys 0m0.058s
And the comparison is not even fair: the OpenBSD page is mdoc(7),
while Solaris 11 has David Korn's old man(7) page from 1993, and
man(7) in general parses much faster than mdoc(7).
But that's OK. Groff is a professional typesetting system, so
blaming it for being slow as a manual page formatter is not
reasonable, it just isn't what it is made for.
Yours,
Ingo
P.S.
schwarze@isnote $ time lynx --dump http://man.openbsd.org/ksh.1 | wc
5172 21523 165576
0m10.02s real 0m00.03s user 0m00.01s system
