Hi Luke, Luke A. Call wrote on Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 05:34:45PM -0600:
> I think "man -K" would work on gnu/linux, The man(1) implementation used on many (but not all) Linux systems, man-db, does have a -K option since 2009. But what it does is just linearily search through the full text of all manual page files in question, without using any kind of a database - even though it is called man-db. The older man(1) implementation used by some other Linux systems has it, too, since man-1.5e, which was released between 1993 and 1998; that's probably where this option first appeared. It is also available on Solaris 11. I do not consider that option useful. On the one hand, it is so expensive that i wouldn't recommend using it, and even the man-db manual page warns about the seriously bad performance. I don't want options in mandoc that aren't really usable. On the other hand, if you feel like you absolutely must do a full text search across manual pages, you can already do that with grep(1), as you mentioned. So it isn't really needed as an option to mandoc. Actually, i occasionally, but rarely, use grep(1) myself on manual page, but almost exclusively when trying to find pages containing words that ought to be marked up, but where the markup is missing. That's more of a manual tree maintainer job than an end-user job. So i do not intend to implement -K, and would probably even reject patches implementing it, calling them featuritis = bloating the user interface for very little profit, if any. Yours, Ingo
