Re: How to write a man page?
On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Colin Watson wrote:
> <snipped above discussion about troff>
I've had success writing man pages in POD, Perl's psuedo-documentation
language. Even if you aren't familiar with Perl, POD may be easier to
deal with with troff. Perl includes a program called pod2man which will
convert the POD to troff for you. On top of that, I wrote a little
script that does the conversion, renames everything properly (man's
a stickler for having everything properly named), and sticks the finished
pages into the appropriate directory.
If you're interested, I can send you the source to a manpage I created
with POD and you can look it over if you like.
> Also have a look at /usr/share/doc/man-db/examples/manpage.example for
> the basic structure.
Whether you use POD or troff, have a look at the pod2man(1) man page,
it has a lengthy section about how to write a good manpage, which
applies to manpages in general. The Perl 5.6 pod2man page is better than
the 5.005 version (which comes with stable), one place to find it is:
http://www.osxfaq.com/man/1/pod2man.html
(P.S. it's weird, but perldoc.com has the 5.003 manpage, which isn't
nearly as good.)
Good luck,
Aaron
--
So: My point is that [Microsoft] may have a ton of money and be more
vicious than a junkyard dog, and have a stranglehold on dimwitted IS
managers, but they're just not very _competent_.
-- Rick Moen, on macosx-for-users
Reply to: