TOC for man

[Jon M. Hanson]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 08:50:20AM -0700, Eric Shubes wrote:
> 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.

I'll admit that man -k isn't the best solution but it does help even if
it does take a couple of tries to find what you're looking for. Do you
have a recent example of something that you were looking for but didn't
know where to start looking?