waiting for `man'........

[Dave Ciemiewicz]

In article <MCCALPIN.89Oct30123043 at masig3.masig3.ocean.fsu.edu>, mccalpin at masig3.masig3.ocean.fsu.edu (John D. McCalpin) writes:
> Has anyone put together a replacement for the `man' command on the 4D
> machines?  Every time I try to use it, I am amazed that a machine
> costing so much money can do something sooooo slowly! :-)
> 
> Seriously, the `man' program is *much* too slow to be useful for
> online reference, and there has to be some reasonable way to replace
> it.  Has anyone done this?
> 
Dear John, (sorry, I couldn't resist :^)

In the new 3.2 release, there is a completely rewritten version of
'man' which replaces the pitiful AT&T shell script.  In addition to
being faster (finds a man page in 1-2 seconds) it has the following
features:

	From BSD:
	    PAGER and MANPAGER environment variables for specifying
	    alternative pagers for man output.  Sorry, SGI doesn't supply
	    less(1) though if you have it, you can use it.

	    -M <manpath> command line option and MANPATH environment
	    variables for specifying alternate manual paths.

	New features modelled on those a popular competitor's man command:

	    -T <macro-package> command line option for specifying an
	    alternate formatting package.

	    -t command line option for printing manual pages on default
	    printer (see lpadmin(1) for setting default).  The preformatted
	    manual pages shipped by SGI will be printed as NROFF style
	    output.  If you have your own manual page sources and the
	    TranScript(TM Adobe) (SGI Laser Printer) option, and the
	    Documentor's Workbench (NROFF) option, the output will
	    be formatted accordingly.

	New features which are SGI specific:

	    Will search both AT&T System V style manual page trees and
	    BSD manual page trees.  In conjunction with the MANPATH/-M
	    feature, you can NFS mount manual page trees from other
	    manufacturers and read them on your IRIS-4D.  The differences
	    in manual page tree structures prevent this from happening
	    the other way around.

	    -w command line option just prints the path(s) of the matching
	    manual page(s) instead of formatting them.  This can be used
	    within shell scripts or programs which need to search manual
	    page trees.

	    location of manual pages via regular expressions.

	    Preformatted, pack'ed preformatted, compress'ed preformatted,
	    and nroff source manual pages may be freely mixed in manual
	    page trees.  The man command determines the type of manual page
	    automatically and selects the proper output filters automatically.

This new manual page command is not a port of the BSD man or any other
man command.  The new SGI man was written from the ground up to support
the special manual page tree and manual page format requirements of the
SGI manual page trees.

I'm sorry to say that the desparately desired -k and -w (apropos and whatis)
features from BSD have not been implemented in the 3.2 man.  As SGI's licensing
agreements with AT&T require us to ship preformatted manual pages.
There a couple of apropos and whatis scripts that work for the SGI specific
manual pages floating around from users on comp.sys.sgi (info-iris).
A robust and generic solution that handles any manual page tree should be
available in an upcoming major release.

> The one (and only) thing that I liked about the Apollo DN10000 was
> that when you typed `man csh', it opened a window already filled with
> the first page of text in about 1 second.  Going back to the SGI
> machine (even a 4D/240) was very painful....
> 

Using the new man command, you can create a script which will create a  
window like on the Apollo Dino 10 Billion.  Try the following:

----- myman ------------------------------------------------------------------
#
#  See wsh(1) for additional flags for prepositioning the wsh or changing
#  other wsh attributes.  -H is used to prevent wsh from disappearing at
#  upon hitting the end of the manual page.
#
wsh -H -c man $*
----- myman ------------------------------------------------------------------

> --
> John D. McCalpin - mccalpin at masig1.ocean.fsu.edu
> 		   mccalpin at scri1.scri.fsu.edu
> 		   mccalpin at delocn.udel.edu

Yet another reason to upgrade to 3.2.

							--- Ciemo