[TynesideLUG] Digging around man pages.

[Ian Bruntlett]

Hi,

I've been digging around and wanted to get a list of system calls - but I
needed a way to get that info, despite not knowing what all the system
calls names were.

So I played around with apropos (later, man -k) and came up with a command
to do that. I couldn't remember what all the section numbers for man mean
either. So I came up with a shell script to do both for me.

If you run the shellscript from below as ./man-section 2 it does that. If
you want everything, then ./man-section {1..9} will do it but I get a
strange warning message...

Have fun!


Ian

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# 2021-07-11 Ian Bruntlett
# Name   : man-section
# Purpose: To dig around the man pages

function Usage
{
    echo Usage: "$0 section-number (from 1 to 9, optional)"
cat <<END-OF-SECTION-LIST
       1   Executable programs or shell commands
       2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
       3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
       4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
       5   File formats and conventions, e.g. /etc/passwd
       6   Games
       7   Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g.
man(7),
           groff(7)
       8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
       9   Kernel routines [Non standard]
END-OF-SECTION-LIST
}

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    Usage >&2
    exit 0
fi

while [ "$1" != "" ]; do
  man -k "[a-z]" -s "$1"
  shift
done

-- 
-- ACCU - Professionalism in programming - http://www.accu.org
-- My writing - https://sites.google.com/site/ianbruntlett/
-- Free Software page -
https://sites.google.com/site/ianbruntlett/home/free-software