Man Page Output

Man Page Output

To me, one of the downsides of a 'nix is the use of man pages as documentation. If no printed documentation exists, you need to read the man pages. SIMMple, right? Just fire up your trusty 'nix system, and use "groff"... of course!

I have no familiarity with a 'nix filesystem, or configuration, or devices. Think of running through a totally dark room that has chairs scattered at random throughout it... That's what it feels like to me... YMMV...

groff

Svenska from VCF said:

"Manpages are not written in LaTeX or TeX, they are written in troff/nroff using the 'man' macro package.

The basic format has not changed significantly since the late 70s (except that some modern packages have moved to different tooling). Modern groff should be able to render manpages correctly:

Example:
groff -Tascii -man file.1 > file.txt

On traditional UNIX, you'd use "nroff -ms" (or similar, the syntax is a bit weird), which would be part of the "Text Processing" package set.

There are modern tools to convert between a variety of documentation formats. Look for man2html or pandoc, which should support manpage sources."

Thoughts
So, assuming you have AIX for PS/2 installed and are able to identify the man pages that you need, then it is a slamn-dunk. Ed.

Copy and paste on paths

Istarian provides a ray of hope:

NOTE: At this time, AIX For PS/2 doesn't seem to have a GUI file manager that >I< know of. Maybe one could use AADU or PC-Interface for the GUI file manager? Ed.

"So you can't use copy and paste on paths? It's not like you have to live life on the command-line with modern Linux.

Just use a file manager to go the appropriate place and snag the path you need from GUI land. Then you can paste into the terminal either as part of the arguments to the appropriate tool or in front of cd to change to the relevant directory.

Also, wildcards are a thing so you don't have to type out the entire file name, just the part that is unique or important matters.

Environment variables are also a thing (stash the path in one of them and reference the variable from then one. You could also write a short and simple bash script, if needed."

Thoughts on exploring AIX for PS/2

My current view is install AIX for PS/2, including a DOS minidisk. Include AADU, DOS Server [?]. Use ethernet or SLIP to connect to another system running PC-Interface. Ensure all man pages are present by installing PTF0034 -AND- all LPPs.

Another system with NT 4.0 SP6 to run PC-Interface or something simular. Maybe then I can surf the AIX system until I can't take it any more....

Then disseminate the output via a Win7 box.

Most of the man pages for AIX 1.3 are fairly simple. Once you get into the X11/graPHIGs stuff, that is where the training wheels come off.

Though AIX for PS/2 is interesting, there does not seem to be any use for AIX for PS/2. You can run DOS apps from the DOS minidisk (DOS 3.3 to 5.00), but for all the effort, why not run DOS apps on a DOS system? WfW 3.11 / W9x would be adequate to run DOS apps as well.