On Thursday, 30 August 2018 13:36:47 BST John Gardner wrote: > > The locations vary, e.g. a user's $MANPATH. Have the user specify it? > > That won't help... when I said how "*(NodeJS) shells out to the system to > locate manpages for display/processing"*, I was mainly referring to how > Node talks to the system's man(1), asking it where the pages are located > that address a user-specified topic, etc. Or if the user wants to run > `apropos` and get a search rolling, it need to know what to run / what > arguments to pass to locate manpages.. :(
Both man and man_db have config files in /etc where you can specify the command to use for "groff" and "nroff", changing either of these to "cat", or appropriate pre-processors, turns "man" or "man -t" into just a purveyor of the raw roff code, to do with as you will. This is one of techniques I use to view pdf linked man pages on my system.