How to bring man pages for ...?

[sedawk]

Hi,

I don't know how to bring up man-page for a specific topics, e.g., I want to see help on "curses". After typing in "man curses", I got "no man pages for curses".

By the way, is there any table of content of the man pages?

 

[thedaver]

not every application installs man pages... sometimes they are 'info' pages, sometimes none (read: google)

normally you might find the man pages listed under /usr/share/man or /usr/man or ....

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[RhythmAce]

typing help or info will give you a pretty big list of commands. Then use thew man or info pages to read more on the specific command.

 

[flugh]

Try:

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man3/ncurses.3.html

or at the commandline 'man 3 ncurses'. You will probably need to have the ncurses-development package installed. That's totally distro dependant though. There's a really old HOW-TO for it floating around, but it really didn't do much for me back when I tried using ncurses to do a little program. Best thing to do is try open source programs until you find one that does a lot of what you want, then sift through the source code until you figure out how they did it

----
JBR

 

[sedawk]

Thank all of you. They are helpful. Forwarding a little bit based on previous question:

1. Say, I want to look up man-topics on programming, e.g., if I "man mktime", I will get its man-page titled by "linux programmer manual". But how can I access the full manual?

2. To flugh:
How do you open a source code? where to find it? let's say I want to modify a system function called beep()? Or you show me a way to find the source code by your example.

 

[danielhozac]

1. There is not really a way to do that. If your man pages are not gzipped, you could do something like

egrep -Hr "^\.TH.*Linux Programmer's Manual\"$" . 2>/dev/null | ( while IFS=: read FILE LEFT; do echo $FILE; done )

2. Most Linux programs have their source available from their website. Just extract the file you download and change what you want to change, build it and install.

//Daniel

 

[sedawk]

Daniel,

I understood your part 1 answer, however, it doesn't give me grep results. Probably because of the files are gzipped(I don't know yet)

I tried what you said part 2 on obtaining source codes from redhat.com. Maybe I am too new to Linux. I only got some HTML pages on program lists, they are not downloadable. Here is how I did that:

1. go

http://www.redhat.com

2. in search window, type "source code";
3. from a whole bunch results click the ones with source code;
4. then I got the HTML pages I described above.

what is the correct way?

 

[danielhozac]

RedHat has a source RPM available from their FTP site for every package that comes with RedHat Linux. To find out which source RPM you want, try

rpm -q --info <package> | grep 'Source RPM'

, and then download the file from the SRPMS directory on the FTP server.

Note that RedHat do not create all that many applications themselves, it's just anaconda (the installer), the configuration tools and a few more I can't think of right now that were originally developed by RedHat.

//Daniel