I'm trying to compose a one-line command that recursively searches a directory for all files ending in <digit>.in, and then runs the man command on each file found, piping the output from each man command into a separate file on my Desktop.

Here's my attempt so far:

The result should be a series of files on my Desktop e.g. "ext2ed", "e2fsck" etc.

The problem I'm encountering is that the files are not generated because {} expands to the complete filename, including path, thus producing the following errors:

Is there any way I can have my second {} expansion produce the path-less filename, or will I have to write and run a script to achieve my goal?

Try adding `basename {}` intead of just {}

This by itself will not be enough as it will still have the extensions (man pages are USUALLY something like "zsh.1.gz", and doing "man zsh.1.gz" won't work, but "man zsh" will work.

Also note that some man pages (like "stat") have multiple entries, one in any relavent section, thus "man stat" will get you the page for the stat command, but "man 2 stat" will get you the information on the system call. The file name is different too: "stat.2.gz".

The files are "subject"."section"."compression" usually... Sometimes you will find man pages without the compression, but instead the "man" extension.

And that variation requires the filename to be processed in more than the simple approach. I think you will have to parse the file name to handle the section numbers as well.

BTW, the problem has been addressed before:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/bookman
UNFORTUNATELY, my google fu didn't find where the source to the utility was.

If you find it, please post where it is... I (and others) would find it useful as well. It is rather hard to refer to a man page for configuration information... when the computer won't work well enough to access man pages.

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I think you need a small script to parse found files names, I don't think "man ext2ed.8.in" would return something usefull on your system, rather it would be "man 8 ext2ed", no?

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produces the same errors.

Try
But I still think this is not going to work as expected

That is why I said you need more to handle the file names.

You were right.

I have no problems with the filenames or man structure.

displays the relevant man page, and

pipes it to a folder.

The files are all in a directory structure containing the source code of e2fsprogs. The ".in" section reflects the fact that the files are pre-processed to insert some e2fsprogs-specific values (version number etc.) but I don't care about those.

Running

produces a good man page. The only problem is that I need the second {} in my one-liner to return the file basename, not the whole path.

I think that jpollard is on to it with his suggestion of using the basename command, it's just a question of finding the right way to incorporate it in the one-liner.

You don't have the complete man page.

One of the things done to the .in file is to modify configuration pathnames, library references, header references. There can even be differences depending on architecture the resulting software is installed on.

So you are missing a lot more than just the version number.

I appreciate that, thanks, but really it is not important to me.

Got it:

Thanks for helping me get there.

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