47 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
47 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
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# All the Manpages
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I think manpages are neat. I use them a lot to find my way around new programs and especially when programming in C.
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Another thing I like are books. I like big hefty textbooks I can flip through. I have a lot of obscure [no starch press](https://nostarch.com/) books. For me, having a physical book to read through helps me learn new things a lot better than watching a video, or reading something off a screen does.
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Well, why not bring the two together?
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My (admittedly half-assed) attempts to find a physical bound printout of manpages yielded only [this amazon listing for an eye-watering $395](https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Man-Essential-Pages/dp/188817272X).
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*Screw it* I thought, *I'll do it myself*
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I present to you `mantobook.sh`, my bad solution to this.
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## Mantobook
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Mantobook works by going through every manpage on your computer section, by section and converting each individual page into an `html` file. Mantobook tries to use [`pandoc`](https://pandoc.org/), but if that fails it'll just resort to good ol' `groff` + a little `sed` to clean things up.
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After that, it combines every single manpage html file into one big html file for each section (this uses a lot of ram).
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At that point I'll have 9 folders filled with individual files like `man/1/ls.html`, `man/1/kak.html`, or `man/4/null.html` and another folder with really big files like `man/1.html`, `man/2.html`, etc. Those are one big `html` file with every manpage in that section. Mantobook also separates intro pages if those exist and put them at the front of the generated section page.
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Finally, the last optional part is to combine all 9 section files into one big mega-man-book.html. I did that and converted *that* to pdf using `pandoc` again.
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I did my best to have the script do as much as possible in parallel since thousands and thousands of files are getting moved around and written to.
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Running the full program takes about 40 minutes and crashes every other program on my computer. Completely worth it in my opinion.
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Well, now I've got this big ol' pdf, who do I throw money at to print and bind it for me?
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## From digital to physical
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It turns out- no one.
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Not only is the pdf in excess of 160,000 pages, most book publishers refuse to print single copies of anything over ~840 pages. I don't know what 160,000 / 840 is, but that's a lot of volumes.
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Ok, so we just print it all out and then bind it no?
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Except, I don't have 160k pages of paper, and I don't think it's fair to waste all that on a hobby project.
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## Conclusion
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Maybe someday I'll write a program to randomly select 840 pages worth of manpages and make a book out of just those. Then I'll get it printed/bound and be able to brag about how I have a book.
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In the meantime, you can checkout the script I wrote [here](https://github.com/secondary-smiles/mantobook). If github lets me, I'll also push all my manpages as html files so you can see those too.
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This was a fun little side-questy adventure!
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