[arch-general] man page selection helper for arch

[David C. Rankin]

All,

   For what it is worth, I like to have an automatic list of manual pages 
presented when there is more than one matching page available (similar to 
whatis) I also like to be able to select which page to display from the that 
list, without having to type 'man pg name' again. This has always been a feature 
on some oh the other distros. I couldn't find anything that would do that on 
Arch, so I wrote a small function that can be aliased to provide the functionality.

If you're interested, it is:

## function to alias as man on arch to provide
#  user selection of available man pages
manselect() {
     [ -z "$1" ] && return 1
     if [ -z "$2" ]; then
         local timeout=5
         local pgs=( $(whatis "$1" | sed -e 's/^.*[(]//' -e 's/[)].*$//') )
         local npgs=${#pgs[@]}
         [ $npgs -eq 0 ] && return 1
         local pg=${pgs[0]}
         if [ $npgs -eq 1 ]; then
             /usr/bin/man $pg "$1"
         else
             local line
             while read -r line; do
                 printf " %s\n" "${line%)*})"
             done < <(whatis "$1")
             printf "Select a man page (%s): " "$pg"
             read -t $timeout ans && pg=$ans || echo ""
             /usr/bin/man $pg "$1"
         fi
     else
         if [ ${1:0:1} -eq ${1:0:1} ] >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
             /usr/bin/man $1 "$2"
         else
             printf "error: invalid man page specification: '%s'\n" "man $1 $2"
         fi
     fi
}

   I just include it as a function in .bashrc and then provide an alias:

alias man='manselect'

   You can adjust the order the man pages are presented in by adjusting the 
SECTION order in /etc/man_db.conf. This can tailor the order of which page is 
shown by default if no selection is made.

   Thought I would pass it along...


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.