Re: using man pages for programming
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 01:14:57PM +0100, Robert Land wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 07:32:51PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 07:01:15PM +0100, Robert Land wrote:
> > > reading the signal(7) man page I noticed
> > > the header "Linux Programmer's Manual" -
> > > yet, how to I find the contents or index
> > > of this manual 'section'?
> >
> > Install dwww and use the index it generates. Use apropos to look for
> > keywords in the headers of man pages.
>
> I had come across dwww browsing apt-cache, I think tkman
> has something simular - but It didn't help me to under-
> stand if/how all these man pages are logicaly organised.
In general they aren't, beyond the division into sections. There's no
central authority administering the contents of man pages.
> "Apropos" is one of my favorit helpers, but if you do a:
> "apropos program|grep signal"
> you end up in no results, yet the above mentioned signal
> man page has this header "Linux Programmer's Manual".
apropos looks in the "NAME" section of the page, not that text (which is
mostly not very important and usually just a description of the numeric
section or the organization responsible for the page; "Linux
Programmer's Manual" is simply set in the .TH line of the man page
itself).
You might find the package system more informative here. 'dpkg -S
signal.7' says that that page comes from the 'manpages' package, and
'dpkg -L manpages' will list the other pages from the same source.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson (man-db maintainer) [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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