searching a man page?
 

Hi,

Once you have a man page open for a particluar command, how can you search the man page for a particular option? For example, I am trying to search man gcc. That man page is extremely long and I want to find out what the -I option does. How can I find the relevant description? In the preamble for that man page, it shows:

Is there a way to click on one of those options to go to its description?

You can search simply by typing /-Bprefix and it will highlight all instances of that in the document.

well man pages are just text, man isn't responeible for things like that, but man uses less as the default pager, which responds very mich like vi / vim, so most non-editing vi commands work. in your case, just do "/ -I " to find it. also hitting n will go to the next ocurrence shoudl there be one.

Oops, I forgot the n part. You can check out the "Commands" section of less' man page for more options.

man gcc | grep -A 15 'I dir'

will find -I dir pluss the 15 lines following that match.

Note: if you add the - with the I, grep will choke up for some reason.

With all due respect, that's horrible! what about the 2nd line of the definition??

Eventually you can save the manual pages as text files and open them with your favourite editor. The command is
A lot of distributions have also a GUI to browse man pages. For example on OpenSUSE all the installed manual pages can be accessed from the KDE Help Center.

You do that regularly do you? I guess whatever suits people best. old habits die hard...

Chris, what are you talking about? Have I told or done something wrong?

Hi,

You could look at 'LINUX MAN PAGES ONLINE'. Any browser would work for you.

well that's not my place, and in now way authorative, just seems a long way round to do not much. You could actually get a similar result by changing the manpager to that editor probably.