SpecialManPage

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Revision as of 16:53, 12 February 2015 by Woozle (talk | contribs) (troubleshooting hint)
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About

SpecialManPage is a simple extension for MediaWiki which allows any manpage (of those installed on the web site's server) to be displayed within the wiki as a Special page, which is often more readable than the standard terminal-based display. It makes use of the "man" command's "--html" option which displays output in HTML instead of fixed-pitch plaintext. The page to display is requested within the URL.

Some examples:

Manpage contents can also be transcluded, but this may not be particularly useful until some features are added for extracting partial content of manpages rather than returning the entire thing.

Links

Troubleshooting

If you get a blank page (no errors but no manpage either), make sure groff is installed. The man command uses groff for HTML formatting.

Future

Planned features:

  • return just a summary
  • search manpages by topic or content
  • list available manpages
  • support for crosslinks to other manpages (not sure this is possible)
  • texinfo support