Free man software for linux

man package is man page suite, including man, apropos, and whatis consists of programs that are used to read most of the documentation available on a Linux system. The whatis and apropos programs can be used to find documentation related to a particular subject.

man was written by John Eaton. He does not maintain man anymore - please do not bother him with remarks about the current version, which is rather different from the original one.

In man-1.6 Eric S. Raymonds browser-handoff functionality was added, with future minor versions planned to cleanup internationalization and cross platform support (Cygwin, solaris, and perhaps Win32).

There is a very different man program, also derived from John Eatons original version (by Graeme W. Wilford) distributed under the name man_db, with version numbers like man_db-2.3.10. Do not confuse the two, they are mutually incompatible, although they perform nearly the same job.

Sman is the Searcher for Man pages. Based on the example of the same name in Josh Rabinowitzs article "How To Index Anything" in the July, 2003 issue of Linux Journal (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6652), sman is an enhanced version of apropos and man -k. Sman project adds several key abilities over its predecessors:
- Supports complex natural language text searches such as "(linux and kernel) or (mach and microkernel)"
- Shows results in a ranked order, and optionally an extract (using -e) of the manpage showing the searched text highlighted
- Allows for searches by manpage section, title, body, or filename (use metaname=searchword)
- Indexes the complete contents of the man page, not just the title and description
- Uses a prebuilt index to perform fast searches
- Performs stemming so that a search for "searches" will match a document with the word "searching"

Pod::Man is a Perl module to convert POD data to formatted *roff input.

SYNOPSIS

use Pod::Man;
my $parser = Pod::Man->new (release => $VERSION, section => 8);

# Read POD from STDIN and write to STDOUT.
$parser->parse_file (*STDIN);

# Read POD from file.pod and write to file.1.
$parser->parse_from_file (file.pod, file.1);

Pod::Man is a module to convert documentation in the POD format (the preferred language for documenting Perl) into *roff input using the man macro set. The resulting *roff code is suitable for display on a terminal using nroff(1), normally via man(1), or printing using troff(1). It is conventionally invoked using the driver script pod2man, but it can also be used directly.
As a derived class from Pod::Simple, Pod::Man supports the same methods and interfaces. See Pod::Simple for all the details.

new() can take options, in the form of key/value pairs that control the behavior of the parser. See below for details.

If no options are given, Pod::Man uses the name of the input file with any trailing .pod, .pm, or .pl stripped as the man page title, to section 1 unless the file ended in .pm in which case it defaults to section 3, to a centered title of "User Contributed Perl Documentation", to a centered footer of the Perl version it is run with, and to a left-hand footer of the modification date of its input (or the current date if given STDIN for input).

Pod::Man assumes that your *roff formatters have a fixed-width font named CW. If yours is called something else (like CR), use the fixed option to specify it. This generally only matters for troff output for printing. Similarly, you can set the fonts used for bold, italic, and bold italic fixed-width output.

Besides the obvious pod conversions, Pod::Man also takes care of formatting func(), func(3), and simple variable references like $foo or @bar so you dont have to use code escapes for them; complex expressions like $fred{stuff} will still need to be escaped, though. It also translates dashes that arent used as hyphens into en dashes, makes long dashes--like this--into proper em dashes, fixes "paired quotes," makes C++ look right, puts a little space between double underbars, makes ALLCAPS a teeny bit smaller in troff, and escapes stuff that *roff treats as special so that you dont have to.

man2web is a program that converts man (manual) pages to HTML.
man2web converts man (manual) pages to HTML via CGI or on the command line.
man2web also allows for keyword (apropos) searching and generation of section indexes.
Main features:
- customizable style sheets
- section index generation
- automatic link generation for man pages and external URLs
Enhancements:
- support for calling lynx to display the page

TkViewMan is a graphical man page viewer for Linux. TkViewMan project is written in Tcl/Tk, using the BLT extension. TkViewMan is free software and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Main features:
- Tabs for multiple man pages
- Ability to find all man pages for a command, with each man page getting its own tab
- Ability to open as many tabs as desired within the main window, which can be scrolled if needed
- Ability to search a man page
- Keyboard shortcuts for creating/removing tabs
- Command history using arrow keys

Sman::Man::Convert is a Perl module to convert manpages to XML for sman-update and sman.

SYNOPSIS

# this module is intended for internal use by sman-update
my $smanconfig = new Sman::Config();
$smanconfig->ReadDefaultConfigFile();
my $converter = new Sman::Man::Convert($smanconfig);
#$converter->ClearCache(); # if you wish
my ($type, $outputref) =
$converter->ConvertManfile($manfile);

Use MANCMD and COLCMD (see perldoc sman.conf) to convert the man pages from ASCII into XML.

Laughing Man Factorial is the paranormal evil twin of Laughing Man. Factorial also has an unexplained superiority complex, almost exponential you might say, over the original Laughing Man which we will hence forth refer to as Junior for appeasement of currently unwarranted hoity-toity.
Like Junior it is an application for monitoring webpage changes, however it does so using the Objective-C/Cocoa framework as opposed to Java, and leverages Core Data, bindings, and value transformers to produce a smaller code footprint. Less fluff and more meat I say, more meat and less fluff.
Factorial is in a experimental state, it is not recommended that current users of Junior switch completely to this version. You can safely import your data and tinker with Factorial, but it is recommended that any data that you want to remain consistent, be done through old stable Junior.
Factorial may not be forgiving on data when upgrading from one version to the next for the next several releases, hence the adjectives paranormal and evil in the preface.
Junior Equivalent functionality
Splitbar position saved on shutdown
Categories display like junior
New Features
Drag and drop funtionality greatly enhanced
supports dragging to and from Safari and OmniWeb
Change log embedded into application and available through menu.
Enhancements:
- This release fixes several bugs, and provides several feature enhancements, bringing the Factorial branch almost up to par with the original Laughing Man.
- Most notably, a nasty Java to Objective-C, Date to NSDate porting bug in the beta was fixed.
- The beta was usable, but users had to wait a little under 3 years for each site refresh.
- This issue has been fixed in 0.1, but you must reset your data if you used the beta.

Memchan is an extension library to the script language Tcl, as created by John Ousterhout. Memchan provides several new channel types for in-memory channels and the appropriate commands for their creation.
They are useful to transfer large amounts of data between procedures or interpreters, and additionally provide an easy interface to on-the-fly generation of code or data too. No need to [set] or [append] to a string, just do a simple [puts].
Enhancements:
tools/mpexpand
- Added new tool. Linux/ix86 starpack containing a doctools processor.
tools/nroff_regen
- Rewritten to use mpexpand for most
tools/manpage_regen
- conversions. The conversion to HTML
tools/rules/manpage.html.site
- for the website still relies on the old expand system. Writing a good formatting engine for that, even if derived from the doctools HTML engine takes more time than I want to invest right now. Rewriting the rules file instead. That was less work.
doc/fifo.man
- The original contents were written
doc/fifo2.man
- in a precursor format to doctools.
doc/memchan.man
- Now rewritten to conform to the
doc/null.man
- doctools specification.
doc/random.man