Table of Contents
man2html
Introduction
man2html can generate on the fly HTML pages from man documentation. This makes it a useful addition to asciidoc based notes. 1) One of the advantages it offers is that when man pages are converted to HTML they become navigable through hyperlinks. A similar script exists for info, info2www.
man2html can be used from the command line, for example, to read in lynx the html-formatted man page of grep:
$ zcat $(man --path 1 grep) | man2html -l | lynx -stdin
It is more useful, however, to setup a cgi-bin infrastructure which will allow the on the fly operation, see man2html(1).
http
This is the most versatile mode, as it works from any browser.
# mkdir /var/www/cgi-bin/man
# $EDITOR /etc/lynx.cfg
# NB: <TAB> must be a real tab. TRUSTED_LYNXCGI:<TAB>/var/www/cgi-bin/man/
# $EDITOR /var/www/cgi-bin/man/man2html
#!/bin/bash # $1 is the man section # $2 is the command name zcat "$(man --path $1 $2)" | /usr/bin/man2html
# chmod 0755 /var/www/cgi-bin/man/man2html
# /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd start
See asciidoc Mini HOWTO for how to use in an asciidoc file.
lynxcgi
This works only from lynx. Make sure lynx is compiled with enabled cgi-bin
, the default for Slackware.
$ mkdir -p /home/httpd/cgi-bin/man
$ $EDITOR /etc/lynx.cfg
# NB: <TAB> must be a real tab. TRUSTED_LYNXCGI:<TAB>/home/httpd/cgi-bin/man/
$ $EDITOR /home/httpd/cgi-bin/man/man2html
#!/bin/bash # $1 is the man section # $2 is the command name zcat "$(man --path $1 $2)" | /usr/bin/man2html -l
$ chmod 0755 /home/httpd/cgi-bin/man/man2html
A link in an asciidoc file for grep will be:
lynxcgi:/home/httpd/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+grep[grep(1)]