[9fans] man -p vs. man|page (was: improvement for vmware)

[9fans] man -p vs. man|page (was: improvement for vmware)

[Pietro Gagliardi]

On Jul 6, 2008, at 3:04 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:

>> See patch(1) for instructions on contributing a patch.
>>
>> 	man -t patch | page
>>
>
> which is equivalent to
>
> 	man -p patch
>
> - erik

The following, however, are not:

	man -t 2 open pipe | page
	man -p 2 open pipe

The first create a single troff output with both the open(2) and
pipe(2) man pages, and pipes the resultant to page. The second is the
same as

	man -t 2 open | page
	man -t 2 pipe | page

I personally don't like this behavior, so I just pipe to page. In
fact, I have a custom rc function that does just a little more:

	fn manp{
		if (~ $1 (c++ String)) # C++ compilers and libString
			man -t -S $* | page
		if not
			man -t $* | page
	}

(The manindex will give me consolefs(4) for "c++" and "C++" and both
libString and string() in draw(2) for "String".)