Re: Programming man pages.

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Ted Roden wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone.
> 
> I apologize for such a silly question.

  well, if you can't find an answer then it's not silly to ask...

> I can't seem to find which package contains the man pages for basic
> programming functions like stat and sprintf etc.
> 
> I was thinking perhaps it is gcc-doc, but it claims:
> 
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   g++ g++-2.95 gcc gcc-2.95 libstdc++2.10-dev libtool
> 
> And I don't want to get rid of those, besides I have a feeling its not
> that package anyways.

  I am posting this again and again, perhaps this should get some
prominent place in docs since it needed often and looks like people do
not know about it:

  go to debian,org, click on debian packages (left side menu) and use
the last form on the page to search debian distro for a file, any file
and it will tell you in which package the file is located. In your case,
you know you're missing man page for e.g. sprintf function, you check
the man pages and see that the names of the files are in the form:

  what.n.gz where what is the name of the man page and n is the section
number (not sure if all are .gz) so you would search for:

  sprintf.3.gz

  there you go, you know how to fish now (for a very specific fish only,
but hope it will help anyway).

	erik