shell script implementation of man

[Matthew Hiles]

I'll address all the replies at once.

> I assume that you did not see miscutils/man.c, i fear.

It appears man.c is for nroff files.  This is a smaller, simpler
implementation meant to answer the request in the TODO.  :D


> Did you test this with msh ?

The first version I posted, I did not. msh does not appear to support
$() style command substitution, it does support backticks. I've
changed the script and it appears to work with msh without any issues.


> Native French speaking: you could handle LANG and/or -L option (maybe
 not) !

I will try, but later.


>This should default to /usr/share/man

Fixed.


So here's the updated version:

#!/bin/sh

# man - a simple man program for ASCII pages
# Copyright (c) 2008 Matthew Hiles
#
# Licensed under GPLv2 or later, see file LICENSE in this tarball for details.

## requires: find, head, sort, tr, grep/egrep, and less
## optional: zcat, bzcat

#check to see if MANPATH is set and show warning if not
if [ -z "$MANPATH" ]; then
        echo "Warning: MANPATH is not set, assuming /usr/share/man." >&2
        MANPATH=/usr/share/man
fi

case $# in
1)
        pagearg=$1 ;;
2)
        section=man$1
        pagearg=$2 ;;
*)
        echo "Usage: man [section] <manpage>"
        exit
esac

paths=`echo "$MANPATH" | tr ":" " "`
pagefile=`find $paths | grep "/$section" | grep "/$pagearg\." | sort | head -n1`

if [ -z $pagefile ]; then
        echo -n No manual entry for $pagearg
        [ $section ] && echo -n " in section $1 of the manual."
        echo
        exit
fi

#okay, found the page, try decompressing and displaying
case $pagefile in
*.bz2)
        bzcat $pagefile | less ;;
*.gz)
        zcat $pagefile | less ;;
*)
        less $pagefile ;;
esac

#cleanup, just incase
paths=
pagefile=
pagearg=
section=