From owner-freebsd-questions  Sat May 13  7: 7:20 2000
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Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 13:34:46 +0100
From: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk>
To: Darren Wyn Rees <merlin@netlink.co.uk>
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: accessing local man pages
Message-ID: <20000513133446.J10128@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>
References: <20000511220417.C10040@netlink.co.uk>
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Darren Wyn Rees wrote:

> Using Linux, I can type 'man -l <manpage>' to pick up a local man page.
> 
> (By "local", I mean man page is in pwd).
> 
> How can I do that with FreeBSD man command ?
> 
> I've tried ... man -M <path to local man page> <man page>

You could do it the hard way,

groff -mdoc -mtty-char -Tascii manpage.1 | less
or
gzip -dc manpage.1.gz | groff -mdoc -mtty-char -Tascii | less

Or you could stick those in a simple script, say "lman":

#!/bin/sh
for i; do
	case $i in
	*.gz)
		gzip -dc $i | groff -mdoc -mtty-char -Tascii | less
		;;
	*)
		groff -mdoc -mtty-char -Tascii $i | less
		;;
	esac
done

s/less/more/ if that's what you prefer.  All completely untested, of
course. :-) The downside is that you have to type "lman progname.1" or
whatever instead of just "lman progname".

As for -M, I think man expects to find man[1-9] directories inside each
directory of MANPATH, so if you do 'man -M /foo bar' it will probably
look for /foo/man1/bar.1, /foo/cat1/bar.1, etc, repeating for values of
1..9.  Try 'man -d' to see exactly what's happening.

-- 
Ben Smithurst / ben@scientia.demon.co.uk / PGP: 0x99392F7D


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