Showing posts with label man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label man. Show all posts

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Create PDF files of man pages in Ubuntu

One of the most important feature of linux is its internal online help called man pages which gives a detailed description of any command, its options and syntax. A help on a command can be obtained by simply typing man followed by the command name. For example,
man ls
will give details on the syntax and options of ls command.

If such a detailed entry is needed to be sent to someone over the net, then you may want to convert it into a pdf file. Here's a simple trick that could do it using two simple tools - man and ps2pdf.


man with -t option gives output in postscript format which is well suited for printing.
ps2pdf does the function of printing to a pdf file. So that's the simple trick here. We're going to pipe the output of man -t to ps2pdf and assign it a filename. And we're done.

For example,

man -t ls | ps2pdf - ~/ls_manpage.pdf

The above example creates a pdf file named ls_manpage.pdf in the user's home directory whose contents is that of the man ls command.