How to 'cat' a 'man' page?

concoran · 05-21-2008, 11:44 PM

Just like one does 'cat filename', is it possible to do cat a manpage?
Also, in Redhat/Fedora/CentOS, is it possible to see man pages in a browser?

greplinux · 05-22-2008, 12:13 AM

I think it is possible with pipe.

Try this "man <cmd> | cat

Eg:

man rm | cat

:-)

jschiwal · 05-22-2008, 02:23 AM

If you use konqueror you can enter "man:<topic>" in the browser to read an html version.
This also works for info manuals as well: "info:<topic>".

If you want to produce hard copy of a manpage, since it is troff source, I would prefer using

man -t <topic> | lpr
to print it out.

You can simply read it like:
man -t <topic> | kghostview -
A different postscript viewer could be used as well.

If you have the ghostscript-library package, the ps2pdf program can come in handy:
man -t find | ps2pdf - find.man.pdf

helgiks · 05-22-2008, 04:52 AM

You can find the actual man file under /usr/share/man (this may vary) and use $ bzcat manfile

(it probably is compressed with bz2 extension, bzcat will decompress and post the output to stdout.)

Kenhelm · 05-22-2008, 05:44 PM

To get a plain text version of a man page try:

Code:

man <topic> | col -b > topic.txt

The text file can be viewed in Firefox, Konqueror, Dillo etc.