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Man Page Project Can Now Use Official POSIX Docs
Martin_Sturm writes "The IEEE consortium announces in a recent press release that it granted permission to the Linux Man Page Project to incorporate material from the official documentation on the POSIX standard. Obviously this is very good news for the Man Page project which now has access to a huge amount of good documentation. Until recently the project could not use this documentation due to copyright restricions."
Try reading info pages with "pinfo" instead of "info" - you'll like info pages much more when you've got a decent viewer =)
Umm, both my slackware and gentoo boxes have a full man page for cp. Apparently they're from the fileutils package.
I'd suggest everyone load up the funny-manpages and asr-manpages if you're bored.
man lart
Get pinfo then. It's much more usable than that crappy info.
I really don't know, this is not a troll, I didn't even know that there were POSIX man pages.
There are no POSIX man pages. But previously they weren't allowed to even quote the POSIX standard in their manpages. They had to rewrite it all and hope they didn't introduce any inaccuracies in their rewriting.
Now they can just quote the standard itself where they want to.
This is mostly important for programming documentation (e.g. "man 3 strerror")
Many standards organisations survive to a large extent on income generated by selling copies of the standards documents. It's only in recent years started becoming common for standards documents to be available free. Still, even now most ANSI and ISO standards for instance still costs money.
Use the right tool, don't let the wrong tool use you.
- Barrie
How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page?
Like it was done by someone who didn't understand the Unix documentation scheme.
The man pages were never the entire body of Unix documentation, just the first volume. The second volume consisted of longer, more tutorial or in depth documents for the programs that needed it. (Like some compilers, or awk, or [t]roff, etc.)
Way back in prehistory I worked with a port of Version 7 Unix (UTS) that came with a complete set of printed manuals -- the man pages were only half the documentation.
That said, info is lame, and commands that have no man page because they have info doubly so.
-- Alastair
It's extremely useful for things like 'this glibc function deviates slightly from POSIX section xx.yy, which states:'
Another good one is 'This extension[/odd syntax/whatever] is for compliance which POSIX section aa.bb, which states as follows:'
(purposeful inconsistency.. boredom otherwise)
Download POSIX 2001.
(POSIX 2001 and SUSv3 are the same document.)
Isn't promoting standards one of the main reasons for the IEEE consortium's existance? How do you promote standards by not allowing anyone to reprint them?
Generally the IEEE (and ISO, ANSI, etc) don't make the standards available without some serious outlays of cash. I once needed access to a particular ANSI standard (X9.19, if you're curious), and found it cost ~$80. I managed to get a copy through ILL, and found that it was 20-30 staple-bound pages (most of which was legal garbage, with about 2 pages of useful info).
Often ISO and IEEE will make the final draft available online, which is pretty useful, but you generally can't claim compliance without either buying the standard and/or going through expensive testing regimens. NIST will put the full final standard online, but they're always marked as being unofficial, if you want to claim compliance you have to buy the paper copy.
It's the standard way of handling standards.
The format is not info but texinfo, which produces output in many forms: TeX (for typeset documents), HTML, as well as info; furthermore, the man pages for many GNU programs are now produced by automatic conversion from the info source.
Texinfo beats roff format for man pages because it supports structure and hyperlinks. XML (or SGML) formats are even better, but "man format" sucks. And I've written a lot of "man pages" in my career.
(Since this is not very informative:)
At that time, HTML didn't yet exist (or, at least, wasn't ubiquitous as it is now), so info made at least some sense (although I've always preferred man pages and n/troff docs myself).
Nowadays, however, it makes no sense at all to continue with info when HTML/XML is so common.
All of the info docs should be translated to HTML or XML and the old, obsolete info format should be abandoned.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I teach System Admin. Had a class this week in fact. Used the man page on crontab to do it, and it included examples right there in the manpage.
That is taken from the man page for crontab, section 5, from RH9/Fedora. I also contains a detailed description of each field.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Saturday Night Live? If that sketch is what it sounds like, it was pre-Python. I forget who performed it originally (At Last, the 1948 show?), but it had some of the Python members in it, if I recall correctly.
I always hated using info pages until I came across pinfo, a colorized info/man viewer using arrow keys. That phrase is insufficient to describe its utility. It actually makes info pages useful! Debian has it in package repositories and I'd guess that other Linux distributions, perhaps BSDs, etc. package it.