man program wanted

[John W. Eaton]

In article <BGLENDEN.91Jan5141535 at colobus.cv.nrao.edu>
bglenden at colobus.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) writes: 
>
> Does anyone have the source (c/shell/perl/whatever) for a "man"
> program that understands MANPATH and PAGER? To my surprise, man on my
> new (to me) DS3100 (Ultrix 4.0) doesn't understand these. Thanks!

I have one that I wrote for the same reason.  The distribution
includes man(1), apropos(1), whatis(1), and manpath(1).  It has all
kinds of neat features that other versions of man don't, including
support for multiple man page directory trees, preformatted man pages,
and troff.  It is distributed under the terms of the GNU copyleft.

If you compile with support for preformatted man pages, man(1) will
try to update the preformatted page if the man page source is newer.

If you compile with support for troff, you can say things like
`man -t foo | psdit > foo.ps' and have fabulous printed documentation
as well.

There is a version of man in the freed Berkeley sources, but the last
time I looked at it, it didn't know how to format pages when required.

There is also a solution written in perl which is probably superior in
every way, but, like me, you may prefer my C and shell version anyway.
:-)

In any case, version 1.0 of man is available via anonymous ftp from
andy.che.utexas.edu (128.83.162.5).  Please limit your use of this
service to off hours.

Cheers,

John W. Eaton
jwe at che.utexas.edu
Department of Chemical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin