TOC for man

[Eric "Shubes"]

Jon M. Hanson wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 07:53:43AM -0700, Eric Shubes wrote:
>> I'm tired of hunting for man pages. My problem is, "man what"?
>>
>> I usually know what package I'm looking for some documentation about (or
>> want to learn about), so I "rpm -ql package | grep man" to see what man
>> pages are available.
>>
>> Is there a better way? Of course there could be. I've googled and came up
>> with nothing that's CLI oriented (which is what I want).
>>
>> I'm thinking of writing a script:
>> mansfor [package_name]
>> that will give me a nice menu of man pages to browse for a particular
>> package. That would satisfy my immediate need. Then I'd probably add -s to
>> search for a string included in a package_spec, and optional section numbers
>> to filter, so it'd look more like
>> mansfor {section_number} ... {-s} [package_spec]
>>
>> Does anyone know of something like this that already exists? I'm just not
>> inclined to reinvent the wheel.
> 
> Do you know about the -k switch to man. This looks for a specific
> keyword in all of the man pages. Also the apropos command may also be
> able to help you.
> 

No I didn't. It appears (man man) that the -k switch is equivalent to
apropos. apropos helps, but it's not always sufficient. I don't necessarily
know what I'm looking for (especially in learning mode). I can sometimes
chase things down using SEE ALSO references, but I feel like I'm on a
scavenger hunt, and it's difficult to get the big picture. All the pieces
are there, but there's no sense of the puzzle.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'