Monday, November 5, 2012

ManToFile: Export MAN Pages to Text File

I've been busy learning some basic scripting in Bash lately. It's not for a serious purpose or something, I just want to be able to do some personal task in automated way using script, so I don't have to do repetitive steps manually everytime.

Bash shell is great tool to do the job, and it provides many useful, straight forward, built-in commands and utilities. We just have to know and learn how to use them.

Using Google and other websites, you can find many useful informations about bash scripting on the internet. It gave me answers to most of my questions in using Bash. But still, in some point or situation, I just want to know the basic, built-in command and utilities in Bash, using official manual how to use them (MAN pages). Combination of reading official MAN pages and working example use of commands gave me better understanding to create my own codes.



With my basic knowledge in Bash scripting, I made a simple, yet very useful (at least for me) script, I gave it a name: ManToFile. As you can suggest, it's a script to redirect the "man" command output to text file, so you can read the MAN page not only in a terminal window, but in a text editor application. Why did I make such silly script? Well, for me, it's more convenience and flexibel to read the text of MAN pages in a text editor window instead of in Terminal.

For those who interested, you can download here:
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