man page template
On Wed, 11 Mar 1998 16:00:20 -0500 (EST), Adam Heath <adam.heath@usa.net> said:
>
> ps: Anybody will to help me write some manpages? Or give me any
> pointers? Those are the only bugs left on my packages.
See man(7), troff(1) and this, which is Tom Christiansen's man page
template:
Message-ID: <199801022050.NAA21708@jhereg.perl.com>
To: Graham Barr <gbarr@ti.com>
cc: Tom Christiansen <tchrist@jhereg.perl.com>,
Andreas J Koenig <koenig@kulturbox.de>,
Perl5 Porters <perl5-porters@perl.org>, tchrist@jhereg.perl.com
Subject: man-template.5
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 02 Jan 1998 14:34:11 CST."
<34AD4F43.1349AE6E@ti.com>
Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 13:50:02 -0700
From: Tom Christiansen <tchrist@jhereg.perl.com>
References: <34AD4F43.1349AE6E@ti.com>
.TH NAME SECTION
.\" NAME should be all caps, SECTION should be 1-8, maybe w/ subsection
.\" other parms are allowed: see man(7), man(1)
.SH NAME
foo, bar \- programs to do something
.SH SYNOPSIS
a short usage summary
.SH "DESCRIPTION"
long drawn out discussion of the program. it's a good idea
to break this up into subsections using the .SS macros, like
these:
.SS "A Sample Subection"
.SS "Yet Another Sample Subection"
.SH OPTIONS
Some people make this separate from the description.
.SH "RETURN VALUE"
What the program or function returns if successful.
.SH ERRORS
Return codes, either exit status or errno settings.
.SH EXAMPLES
give some example uses of the program
.SH ENVIRONMENT
envariables this program might care about
.SH FILES
all files used by the program. typical usage is like this:
.br
.nf
.\" set tabstop to longest possible filename, plus a wee bit
.ta \w'/usr/lib/perl/getopts.pl 'u
\fI/usr/man\fR default man tree
\fI/usr/man/man*/*.*\fR unformatted (nroff source) man pages
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.\" Always quote multiple words for .SH
other man pages to check out, like man(1), man(7), makewhatis(8), catman(8)
.SH NOTES
miscellaneous commentary
.SH CAVEATS
things to take special care with. sometimes called WARNINGS.
.SH DIAGNOSTICS
all the possible error messages the program can print out, and
what they mean.
.SH BUGS
things that are broken or just don't work quite right.
.SH RESTRICTIONS
bugs you don't plan to fix :-)
.SH AUTHOR
who wrote it (or AUTHORS if multiple)
.SH HISTORY
programs derived from other sources sometimes have this.
--
Roderick Schertler
roderick@argon.org
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