Handy script offering

Handy script offering

[Steve Jorgensen]

Ok, perhaps no one cares, but as one of the many 'nix newbies who start 
playing with Cygwin, I scratched an itch that other newbies might have.

The problem is that when you type man <command>, but you enter the common 
command name that all the books tell you about rather than the name of the 
program that's a symlink to on Cygwin, there appears to be no manpage. 
 This one bit me, and I thought there was no man page for "awk" not 
realizing I should be asking for "man gawk".

I wrote a perl script that solves the problem which is included below.  It 
would be very handy for other newbies to have this in the distribution and 
mention it in the manual.

#!/bin/perl

if ( scalar @ARGV ne 1 ) {
    print "\nUsage: metaman <command_name>\n\n";
    print "this command displays the man page for the named program.\n";
    print "If the name refers to a symbolic link to another program,\n";
    print "the man page for that program is displayed.\n";
} else {
    $found = `find \`which $ARGV[0] 2> /dev/null\` -printf \"%l\"`;
    if ( $found =~ /([^\/]+)$/ ) {
        $found = $1;
        $found =~ s/.exe//;
        system("man $found");
    } else {
        system("man $ARGV[0]");
    }
}


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Re: Handy script offering

[David A. Cobb]

At 7/20/01 05:44 AM (Friday), Steve Jorgensen wrote:
>Ok, perhaps no one cares, but as one of the many 'nix newbies who start
>playing with Cygwin, I scratched an itch that other newbies might have.
>
>The problem is that when you type man <command>, but you enter the common
>command name that all the books tell you about rather than the name of the
>program that's a symlink to on Cygwin, there appears to be no manpage.
>  This one bit me, and I thought there was no man page for "awk" not
>realizing I should be asking for "man gawk".

Little do I know, but would it not make sense that
if "awk" => "gawk" then "awk.1" => "gawk.1" etc.
(IOW, symlink the man pages.)




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