On Sat 05 Jan 2013 at 11:19:31 -0600, Richard Owlett wrote:
When I've wanted to look at a man page for an uninstalled package
I've used http://manpages.debian.net .
It would more convenient to have *ALL* pages available locally.
Save the pages you download. These are the ones you want to look at, we
presume.
You would have to download them anyway, even if you went for
the complete collection.
But you want "ALL" pages. Every single one in Debian. Ok, here is an
idea:
1. Make a list of all Debian packages.
2. Look at the URL for a particular man page, say vim
http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=vim&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=Debian+6.0+squeeze&format=html&locale=en
3. Write a script to feed the items in the list you have drawn up to a
program (e.g lynx -dump), replacing query=vim with each item name.
Are they available to download as a set somewhere on the web? [I use
squeeze.]
It is doubtful. But you could provide this as a service.
I have copied all the .deb files from the 8 DVD install set to a USB
drive. How could I extract all the man pages?
'ar -x' will get data.tar.gz from the .deb file. 'tar zvxf data.tar.gz'
will do the unpacking. The man pages are in /usr/share/man. Something
like 'cp' should be able to get at them.