Re: why aren't man pages compressed?
On Wed, 15 Nov 1995, Carlos Carvalho wrote:
> Any decent man program handles compressed pages. If you have one that
> doesn't it's a very good reason to ditch it.
true.
> zcat runs fast enough from my experience.
Yep, i've never had any cause to complain about speed problems with
zcat - with 486-66 and faster problems, most CPUs on lightly-used linux
machines are just sitting idle most of the time, disk speed is the real
bottleneck. For large man pages, zcat may even be faster than cat due
to the reduced disk access...
> In fact, the only argument I have in favour of uncompressed pages
> is that you can run a grep in the entire directory to search for
> something. For example, I found the file /etc/gateways and didn't know
> what it was about. I did a grep and found it in the routed page.
zgrep can grep compressed files.
i would have thought apropos would turn up some info on /etc/gateways but I
tried it and it doesn't. Maybe we need a man page for gateways(5). One for
networks(5) would be good too.
Craig
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