This solution works perfectly well but is a bit of a joke as well because the first thing I thought when I read your question was 'Who still literally uses man from the command line? Doesn't everyone just Google the man page they want (so that they get fancy things like unlimited scrolling)?'. Then I realized that the sites I Google usually all have both types of commands so why not just use them to provide a uniform man page interface across all commands. Hence, this fun was born.
This requires an Internet connnection for any entries you haven't already looked up at least once. It also needs these two small apps which are missing in a default installation of Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install tidy html2text
These aren't absolutely needed but they do help make it look a little nicer. Tidy will clean the HTML and html2text will format that html as formatted text (which is usually pretty trivial since most of these sites are already text formatted and just wrapped in <pre> tags.
Now all you need to do is add this to the end of ~/.profile
:
function iman() {
if [ ! -d "/usr/share/iman" ]; then
sudo mkdir -m a=rwx /usr/share/iman
fi
if [ ! -f "/usr/share/iman/$1.html" ]; then
curl "http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?$1"| tidy -n -asxml 2>/dev/null| html2text > "/usr/share/iman/$1.html";
fi
if [ -f "/usr/share/iman/$1.html" ]; then
cat "/usr/share/iman/$1.html";
else
echo "Entry not found."
fi
}
After you logout and then back in you should be able to type this:
iman cd
and it'll display the man page for cd
.
This uses a data directory (/usr/share/iman) in order to minimize our network requirements (so it'll work for entries you've already found before even without the connection; also to minimize load on this random linux man pages site I found with the system entries we want in it as well). If you don't use this anymore you'll want to remove that to recover disk space.
Hopefully, the rest is pretty straight forward.
echo
is a builtin command but has a man page?echo
is also a system command (executable) located in/bin
. You can check this usingtype -a echo
. The same thing happens withtime
and maybe others.info bash
yet?