The man.pl gateway

Note : I don't have a cool name for the thing - let's call it man.pl .

This code is quite old and should be rewritten as a CGI-compliant script.

What is man.pl ?

It is a Plexus 3 module providing access to manual pages of several architectures.

A list of features :

  • uses manual pages in source format and already formatted manpages
  • uses compressed, gzipped or not compressed manpages
  • uses manpages in a normal structure (man1/*.Z) or HP-ish structure (man1.Z/* ).
  • makes links to include files (due to unknown copyright restrictions only Linux include files are available )
  • makes such links in include files, too
  • uses regular expressions for search

    • Requirements

    This client should support the form feature as implemented in XMosaic 2.0pre3 , but a stripped-down version is supposed to be plain HTML. The gateway currently runs on top of Plexus 3.0g.

    Known Bugs/Problems

  • Doesn't handle ESC 7 sequences produced by ULTRIX nroff. I don't know why they are produced.
  • Xmosaic 2.0pre2 doesn't recognize the include files as HTML. A <PLAINTEXT> mark is added, but I don't know who does it. Hints welcome!
  • Man.pl assumes preformatted manpages to encode boldspace as character, backspace, character . My formatted HP-UX manpages used to print a bold character four times, so I have to use unformatted manual pages.
  • It [ng]roffs unformatted manual pages on the fly and doesn't cache a list of available manual pages. This may cause a certain load on slow machines.
    • From the world outside the Dept. of CS you have to access this gateway through a slow link.

    In this case : Please don't use this installation frequently! Install your own!

    These are man.pl's entry forms :

  • Uses forms (XMosaic 2.0pre3 required)
  • Without forms

    • The source code : man.pl and a sample man.conf

    Sven Rudolph