I want to print (a hard copy) of the online manual

[scubawd]

I would like to print out and put in a binder the online manual of Unix commands. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything--in the books I have--about if this is possible to do and how I would do it.

I am hoping there is a way to print the whole manual at one time, rather than bringing up each command in terminal and then printing that out.

(I do know there are 8 sections to the manual, so when I say print it all out at once, I know I will probably be limited to printing each section separately. I just don't want to print each command separately.)

P.S. I have already run CATMAN on each section, to format the manual pages.

[mervTormel]

you might want to rethink that notion...

% echo $MANPATH | sed 's/:/ /g' | xargs du -chs
5.9M    /sw/share/man
0       /sw/man
20k     /Users/merv/man
1.1M    /usr/local/man
328k    /usr/local/share/man
25M     /usr/share/man
6.5M    /usr/X11R6/man
39M     total

% man xargs
... copy one page to clipboard, feed to wc, char count is 2,684

% zclc 39*1024*1024/2684
15236.4

so, you'll have >15,000 logical pages to print. trees?! timber! binder?! how about "wall o' binders" ?

besides, i think you'll only want commands from section 1 and 8, and then not all of them, and then, you'll not like nor use the results. if you do persue this, be sure to squish multiple blank lines and format to use a page efficiently. not sure how cat pages are formatted, but man pages are very inefficient on the standard 8/11 page.

get comfortable with several shell windows and use one for examining man pages while you experiment with the commands in another window.

regarding the sections:

# Specific section/directory combinations.
1 - commands
2 - syscalls
3 - libc
4 - special
5 - files
6 - games
7 - miscellaneous
8 - admin
9 - kernel

unless you're a programmer, sections 2, 3, some of 4, 5, 7, and 9 are going to cause apoplexy.

[iroot]

There are web sites (search "unix commands") that have html and/or .pdf files of the man pages.

BTW, here's a command to list commands in each section:

man -k "-" | grep "n"

where n is the section; you want to look at 1, 6, and 8 for sure, but try them all.

also look (just ls the directory) in /bin, /sbin, usr/bin, and usr/sbin for some commands that don't have man pages.

[vonleigh]

Hello,

Interesting discovery, tried the command above with grep "(6)" and only one thing came up. Tried man games and this is what came up:

DESCRIPTION
       Terminal-based  games  and  their  manual  pages  are  not
       included in the Mac OS X release.  In lieu of  these,  the
       /Applications/GrabBag  directory  contains a number of Mac
       OS X applications you might want to try.

DEMONSTRATION PROGRAMS
       The demos in /Applications/GrabBag are  designed  to  give
       aspiring  programmers  a taste of what's possible with Mac
       OS X.  If you're interested in science, music, art, signal
       processing,  games, animation, timing, optics, PostScript,
       chaos, electronics, chess, and  so  on,  you  should  find
       something compelling in this collection of demos.

       Note  that  these  demo  programs  are not generally main-
       tained, and usually do not come with sources, although the
       source  code  for some demos is available in the directory
       /Developer/Examples.

I guess they were something of the early beta's or something like that.


Vonleigh