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Reading man pages in the current directory
Authored by: bluehz on Apr 03, '03 10:53:35AM
Not sure if the Fink version of man is GNU (I suspect it is) but if you have the Fink version of man installed you can simply:

man /path/to/manfile

to display any manfile that is not installed.

While we are on the subject of manpages...

I personally prefer reading man pages through either openman or Safari (or other browser). There is a very nice cgi interface called "man-cgi" located here http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~christia/man-cgi.html

Man-cgi
browse UNIX man pages through WWW
version 1.15
Man-cgi is shell-sed-awk script which converts on the fly the output of the "man" command to HTML.

This allows you to quickly search and read local man pages on your machine using a url like:

http://localhost/cgi-bin/man-cgi?ls

or better yet create a Bookmarks Bar bookmark with this URL in it (broken into two lines for display below):

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

or drag this to bookmarks bar to add the above bookmarklet and it will pop up a simple dialog that allows you to enter your search term.

I just prefer the wide open spaces of a browser for reading long and complex man pages.



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