Re: [abcusers] man
Phil Taylor writes: | | More's the point, how could I have discovered the existence | of col for myself? The biggest problem with getting things | done in Unix seems to be that you keep hitting these barriers | where you can't figure out the solution and you just have to | go and ask someone who knows. This is a long-standing problem in the computer field. If you know the name of something you can usually find out about it. This means you can easily answer questions of the form I sure would like to use the FOO command; I wonder what it does? But if you're like most people, you never find yourself asking questions like this. Mostly, you have a description of what you'd like to do, in words that make sense to you, but you don't find anything with the same keywords in any docs. So you start asking around, until someone tells you Oh, you need the FOO command; it does just what you want. You never would have guessed that, but you look it up, and in the middle of the doc you find something that describes what you want (though in very different words from yours). You can see this sort of language problem all the time in our abc discussions. Every musical style uses its own jargon, a mixture of standard musical terms (with slightly different meanings in different groups) and idiosyncratic terms that musicians in the next group over won't understand. Figuring out how any particular chunk of software deals with your musical concepts is difficult, because the software's author(s) used different terms than you do. There has been some study of this sort of problem with the advent of computer GUIs. Any study quickly proves that most of the users use only a tiny fraction of the GUI's capabilities. The reason is that they don't know about the other semi-magical things that they could do. They don't suspect that most of the capabilities even exist, and they don't know how to ask or what to ask for. Watching someone else doesn't help much, because you usually can't see what they did with the keyboard or mouse, and you don't see any pattern in what changes on the screen. And most of it isn't documented anywhere. What documentation exists is mostly incomprehensible to users. If anyone comes up with a good solution to this problem, it will be a major advance in documentation. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Phil Taylor wrote: $ apropos backspace Nothing found There probably is a keyword that will get it, but I couldn't find one. $ apropos filter which does the same thing as: $ man -k filter But the best solution is to go to: http://www.rocketaware.com/search.htm It has an engine that can do a full text search on all man pages. You can also install such an engine on your own computer: http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.html I use it all of the time. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
Phil == Phil Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Phil More's the point, how could I have discovered the existence Phil of col for myself? I would have guessed man -k backspace might do it for you, but it doesn't on my LINUX system. man -k filter does come up with both col and colcrt. Filter is unix jargon for the kind of program you would expect to need for the job. Phil The biggest problem with getting things done in Unix seems Phil to be that you keep hitting these barriers where you can't Phil figure out the solution and you just have to go and ask Phil someone who knows. What's wrong with asking someone who knows? In the UNIX world, people who know just love being able to tell people who don't know. Once you know, you will too. -- Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 fax: (801) 365-6574 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Jack Campin wrote: :The paper editions of the Unix manuals used to have a keyword-in-context :index of all the commands - usually browsing that would give me an idea. :I presume there is an electronic copy of the same thing somewhere on all :Unix systems. Try: $ apropos keyword Regards, Bob Smither, PhD Circuit Concepts, Inc. = Friendly relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none. --Thomas Jefferson = [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.C-C-I.Com 281-331-2744(office) -4616(fax) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
John Chambers wrote: There has been some study of this sort of problem with the advent of computer GUIs. Any study quickly proves that most of the users use only a tiny fraction of the GUI's capabilities. The reason is that they don't know about the other semi-magical things that they could do. They don't suspect that most of the capabilities even exist, and they don't know how to ask or what to ask for. Watching someone else doesn't help much, because you usually can't see what they did with the keyboard or mouse, and you don't see any pattern in what changes on the screen. And most of it isn't documented anywhere. What documentation exists is mostly incomprehensible to users. While this is true to some extent of any computer system, it is much, much less of a problem with a GUI than it is with a command-line system. GUI-based programs have menus with meaningful words which describe the commands that they can execute. If you are looking for a way to perform some operation that you've never done before, you just pop up all the menus until something catches your eye which looks as if it might be appropriate. Then you try it, secure in the knowledge that if you are doing something dangerous the program will a) warn you, and b) give you an Undo command or c) work on a copy of the original data so you don't lose anything. With a CL interface you issue commands by typing, and typing long complicated words is a drag, so the common commands are very terse. Because they're terse they are necessarily cryptic. If I didn't know how to rename a file in Unix, how would I ever guess that the command is mv? I might guess that that means move (which it does), but not that re-naming the file is a side effect. If I want to perform the same operation in Windows or Mac OS I just click on the file name to highlight it and type the new name. Of course, mv will allow me to do more complicated things like moving/renaming a whole bunch of files at once, but that's a sufficiently uncommon operation that I'd have to go and read the blasted man page to remind myself of how to do it:-) If anyone comes up with a good solution to this problem, it will be a major advance in documentation. My wife, who used to be computer-phobic, recently got a copy of Photoshop 7. This is a professional image editing system of enormous power and complexity. She hasn't asked me how to use it, and the manuals are still in their clingwrap. Nevertheless, she's showing me pictures where she's changed the colour balance, added captions, removed objects that spoil the composition etc. How long would it have taken her to achieve the same results if it had been a CL driven program? Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
Bob Smithers wrote: On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Jack Campin wrote: :The paper editions of the Unix manuals used to have a keyword-in-context :index of all the commands - usually browsing that would give me an idea. :I presume there is an electronic copy of the same thing somewhere on all :Unix systems. Try: $ apropos keyword Tried that earlier. $ apropos backspace Nothing found $ apropos back space Thousands of lines of hits containing either string. There probably is a keyword that will get it, but I couldn't find one. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
To get rid of the backspaces from the man command, use the col command: man vi | col -b vi.txt More's the point, how could I have discovered the existence of col for myself? The biggest problem with getting things done in Unix seems to be that you keep hitting these barriers where you can't figure out the solution and you just have to go and ask someone who knows. The paper editions of the Unix manuals used to have a keyword-in-context index of all the commands - usually browsing that would give me an idea. I presume there is an electronic copy of the same thing somewhere on all Unix systems. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Jeff Bigler wrote: Much simpler, using vi as an example, would be: man vi | cat vi.txt Maybe you have a super-cat installed on your system, but my cats pass all those backspace sequences through, so the above line would be simply equivalent with: man vi vi.txt which does not do the job. However, the simple program that I wrote takes care of it. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
On Sunday, August 3, 2003, at 11:27 PM, I. Oppenheim wrote: Maybe you have a super-cat installed on your system, but my cats pass all those backspace sequences through, so the above line would be simply equivalent with: man vi vi.txt which does not do the job. To get rid of the backspaces from the man command, use the col command: man vi | col -b vi.txt Geoff Old Unix Weenie Allen To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 01:45:32 +0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time) From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Phil Taylor wrote: Actually I'd rather have them as plain text, since I have any number of seraching and indexing programs I can use with that. If that's all you want, it's trivial. Open a text file, call it man2txt.c and give it the following contents: Much simpler, using vi as an example, would be: man vi | cat vi.txt Jeff To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Phil Taylor wrote: Convert all man pages to html, and use you're webbrowser to read them. er, how do I do that? I forgot to answer this part. Just do: man topic | man2html outfile If you dont have it yet, get man2html from: http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.html Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] man
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Phil Taylor wrote: (Sorry guys, not wanting to start a platform-specific flame war, but I'm having to learn to love unix, and man in particular is driving me crazy.) Convert all man pages to html, and use you're webbrowser to read them. If you've installed a search engine like htdig on your computer, that makes it even simpler to search for information. And otherwise, you can use the info system. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
I. Oppenheim wrote: On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Phil Taylor wrote: (Sorry guys, not wanting to start a platform-specific flame war, but I'm having to learn to love unix, and man in particular is driving me crazy.) Convert all man pages to html, and use you're webbrowser to read them. er, how do I do that? Actually I'd rather have them as plain text, since I have any number of seraching and indexing programs I can use with that. Just as an experiment I tried man vi vimanual.txt and was pleased to get a text file out of it. When I opened the resulting text file in a text editor, however, the resulting file had all the bold text in DDOOUUBBLLEE LLEETTEERRS, and all the underlined text spaced out with _a_s_c_i_i _u_n_d_r_l_i_n_e characters. This stuff is actually formatted to be printed out on a teletype, where the only way you can get a bold character is to backspace and print it again! Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] man
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Phil Taylor wrote:
Actually I'd rather have them as plain text, since I
have any number of seraching and indexing programs I
can use with that.
If that's all you want, it's trivial. Open a text
file, call it man2txt.c and give it the following
contents:
#include stdio.h
int main (void) {
char prev = 0, cur = 0 ;
cur = getchar () ;
while (!feof (stdin)) {
if (cur == 8) {
cur = 0 ;
} else if (prev != 0) {
putchar (prev) ;
}
prev = cur ;
cur = getchar () ;
}
return 0 ;
}
save it. Then compile it as follows:
gcc -o man2txt man2txt.c
Now all you need to do is the following:
man vi | ./man2txt vi.txt
Enjoy!
Groeten,
Irwin Oppenheim
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
~~~*
Chazzanut Online:
http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/
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