Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 10:42:35 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: c9707010@alinga.newcastle.edu.au, chrisc@vmunix.com Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Speed of FreeBSD Message-ID: <199808211742.KAA05148@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980821004800.20778A-100000@vnode>
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>Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 00:52:54 -0400 (EDT) >From: Chris Coleman <chrisc@vmunix.com> >On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Stewart Heckenberg wrote: >> Anyone notice that when sometimes looking for a man page, it takes a >> little while to load? >The times when it takes "a little while" to load a man page is because >they are in a compressed format. When it says "formatting man page..." it >is uncompressing them. If you access that man page again, you won't see >that message, and it will load much faster. The man pages are then >recompressed if they are not accessed after a certain amount of time. With respect, I believe that's slightly incorrect. The "formatting man page..." message refers to translating the page from the typesetting language that's used to write the man pages to whatever display medium you chose. (The typesetting language" is based on nroff & troff; in a FreeBSD environment, I'd expect that groff would normally be used.) BTW, if you happen to have a PostScript printer available, it's possible to make some rather nice-looking "man pages" by man -t whatever | lpr (where "whatever" isthe subject of the man page you're interested in.) And to further demonstrate my weird perceptions... [gnt]roff have been used historically for a variety of purposes... including some of the more useful UNIX-oriented books around.... All that said, I believe that Chris' comments regarding the re-compression are essentially correct. (I looked around at the sources; on my 2.2.6-RELEASE system, I don't find the "formatting man page" message at all....) Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill UNIX System Administrator dhw@whistle.com voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 371-4621 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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