[SOLVED] Read from stdin in man?

dansimon · 06-14-2013, 05:50 AM

Hi,

I have a script where I manually extract info from a man page, I need to format this to readable text and then display it in a pager.

script | man --or-- man | script

does not work, because man searches for a man page not given to it and ignores the script input.

script | less

would not work because it would display the man page unformatted, which is not very readable.

I have tried looking at groff and groffer, but without success. Any ideas??

validator456 · 06-14-2013, 06:09 AM

I am not really sure what you want. Is this what you want?

Quote:

man ls > ls.txt

dansimon · 06-14-2013, 06:12 AM

no, I whant to render a man page that is not in the system (/usr/man...), but that is embedded within my script. Therefor I need either man to read my input directly instead of searching for an appropriate man page, or I need to manually render the manpage format to readable text then display this in a pager.

dansimon · 06-14-2013, 08:00 AM

nroff -man <input_file> > <output_file> && less <output_file>
Would work, but this is not at all an elegant solution for a bash script, because it would require a lot of I/O with temporary files.

Is there a way to <read_raw_text> | <format_to_readable_text> | <display_text> ?
Neither man nor nroff nor any other tool I have looked at seems capable of doing this.

Any suggestions?

dansimon · 06-14-2013, 08:52 AM

Solved the issue, you can point man to a non-standard file. My initial tests failed because of a syntax error in the man page

file | man does not seem to work, but I worked around this by
using temporary files in memory ie:

cat file > /dev/shm/file
man /dev/shm/file

I don't particularly like this solution (it's ugly), but it works. marking this as SOLVED

rknichols · 06-14-2013, 01:17 PM

The man command will read from stdin if you tell it to:

Code:

cat file | man /dev/stdin

or from a here-document:

Code:

man /dev/stdin <<EOF
   [insert your manpage source here]
EOF

dansimon · 06-18-2013, 02:56 AM

Wow, thanks! I did not know about /dev/stdin, this is just the elegant solution I was searching for