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View local UNIX documentation in your browser UNIX
Besides the lovely man pages quite a few Unix tools also have html documentation which you can view in your browser. Here's how I set this up:
I used the freeware tool Locator to update the locate database (which contains all the files on your system). Next I searched with Locator for index.html.

If you select to search starting from / (i.e. root), you'll get a massive list of index.html files, most from the /Developer directory (if you installed the developer tools). Scroll down in the results to the bottom where you'll find the Unix tools in the /usr directory. Select the page you're interested in and click on 'Open' in the toolbar. The page will open in your browser where you can bookmark it for easy access.

Pages I've found on my system included html documentation for TeX, LaTeX, ImageMagick, Postgres, GhostScript and even the O'Reilly book "Using Samba, 1st ed." Those who are into the X11 and Fink stuff will probably find many more.

[robg adds: In testing this, I found I only had a couple of index.html pages in my /usr directory. But I did, indeed, have a ton of pages in fink's /sw directory. You'll save a lot of scrolling in the results if you start the search directly in /usr or /sw (or /Developer) as opposed to the top level of the drive...]
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View local UNIX documentation in your browser | 2 comments | Create New Account
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bman
Authored by: Titanium Man on Mar 11, '03 11:57:58PM

pmccann from the sister site came up with something called bman. It'll open manpages in a browser window (complete with links in tact) and is fast. He called it "bman", and it goes a little something like this

#!/bin/sh
# Writes an html formatted manpage to a given file, then
# opens the default browser to display the thing (assuming
# that you've associated .html files with your browser of choice
# Otherwise use eg "open -a mozilla $tfile" on the last line
tfile=/Users/pmccann/junk/somefile.html
man $1 | rman -f HTML > $tfile
open $tfile


The original thread that I got that from is at

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3867&highlight=bman

This is my small change to pcmccann's great idea:

#!/bin/sh
man $1 | rman -f HTML > /tmp/$1.html
open /tmp/$1.html



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View local UNIX documentation in your browser
Authored by: bluehz on Mar 12, '03 11:33:11AM
There is also a really nice cgi that I use locally to view and search man pages on my machine. Makes for nice reading. Very easy to install.

http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~christia/man-cgi.html

and if you really want to get fancy - you can add this bookmarklet to your menubar that will popup a dialog for quick searching in the man-cgi:

Create a bookmark - name it anything you want - for the url use this (all one url - no spaces, broken below for easy reading):

javascript:void(q%3Dprompt('What%20Man%20pages%20would
%20you%20like%20to%20view?',''));if(q)void(location.href='htt
p:%2F%2Flocalhost%2Fcgi-bin%2Fman-
cgi%3F'+escape(q))


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