[Techtalk] Re: info

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 12:03:54AM -0400 or thereabouts, Beth Johnson wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-09-05 at 18:15, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> 
> > I have discovered something interesting -- man -H or man --html gives
> > HTML output!  It displays the manpage in lynx or in the browser defined
> > by $BROWSER.  So you can ignore everything I said about webmin, and go
> > 
> > BROWSER=mozilla man --html fsck
> > 
> > and it will display the manpage for fsck in your current browser window
> 
> Hmm, I'm running RH 7.3 with man 1.5j and get "invalid option --html"

This is because there are two different packages which provide the
command 'man'. Some distros, such as RH, ship the one called 'man' 
which has version numbers as you described. Other distros, such as
Debian, ship man-db, which has version numbers like 2.3.20. 

They have different command-line options and different configuration
files in /etc.

This comes up a lot. I am also using RH and haven't yet found a 
'turn into HTML output' option. I haven't looked very hard yet
though. 

> That sucks because I hate reading the man pages in a term window.

The best I can say is that you get used to it. And the lowest 
common denominator is very useful when trying to work out why 
X has stopped working.

Telsa