Re: [groff] improve a few terminal renderings of special characters

[John Gardner]

> whereis(1)?  Again, not POSIX, but might not deviate so much.

Sadly, it really does. I'll leave you with macOS's annoyingly terse manpage
for the whereis(1) utility:

*WHEREIS*(1)                  General Commands Manual
> *WHEREIS*(1)
> *NAME*
>      *whereis* – locate programs
> *SYNOPSIS*
>      *whereis* [*program* *...*]
> *DESCRIPTION*
>      The *whereis* utility checks the standard binary directories for the
>      specified programs, printing out the paths of any it finds.
>      The path searched is the string returned by the sysctl(8) utility for
> the
>      “user.cs_path” string.
> *SEE ALSO*
>      find(1), locate(1), man(1), which(1), sysctl(8)
> *COMPATIBILITY*
>      The historic flags and arguments for the *whereis* utility are no
> longer
>      available in this version.
> *HISTORY*
>      The *whereis* command appeared in 3.0BSD.
> Mac OS X 10.13                  April 27, 1995                  Mac OS X
> 10.13


*$ whereis groff*
> > /usr/bin/groff
> *$ whereis troff*
> > /usr/bin/troff
> *$ whereis man*
> > /usr/bin/man


It's hopeless... :( Solaris's `man -k` does a better job of that; but
naturally `man -k` means something else on other systems:

[image: solaris.png]

> 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.. :(

On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 at 20:59, Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> > I should ask, what's the most reliable way of running `man -a -w`?
> > I thought this was universal to `man` implementations
>
> Neither are POSIX.
>
> > but Solaris told me otherwise. illumos uses `man -w` to update the
> > `makewhatis` database
>
> whereis(1)?  Again, not POSIX, but might not deviate so much.
>
>     $ whereis sleep | fmt
>     sleep: /usr/bin/sleep /usr/share/man/man3/sleep.3.gz
>     /usr/share/man/man3/sleep.3p.gz /usr/share/man/man1/sleep.1.gz
>     /usr/share/man/man1/sleep.1p.gz
>     $ whereis -m sleep | fmt
>     sleep: /usr/share/man/man3/sleep.3.gz /usr/share/man/man3/sleep.3p.gz
>     /usr/share/man/man1/sleep.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/sleep.1p.gz
>     $
>
> > The reason this is important is because it's how the NodeJS
> > environment shells out to the system to locate manpages for
> > display/processing.
>
> The locations vary, e.g. a user's $MANPATH.  Have the user specify it?
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
> https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
>
>