Pete's Linux Advent Calendar 2007

The 10th day

Manpages

Now you have a collection of selfmade scripts. But without documentation it wouldn't be complete. So here is a quick introduction on manpages. The easiest way to write them is using pod2man. You don't want to write nroff. Here is an example pod file for the up script, called up.pod:

=head1 NAME 

up - position the cursor at first line

=head1 SYNOPSIS

B<up>

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Up positions the cursor at the first line of your terminal

=head1 OPTIONS

There are no options to this command.

=head1 BUGS

B<up> ignores any arguments given

=head1 SEE ALSO

down(1)

Have a look at the pod2man(1) manpage on more advanced usage and the structure of manpages. Now type:

pod2man up.pod > up.1

to create the manpage. To view it type:

man -l up.1

if it looks good you only have to copy it to your manpath. Create a directory ~/man/man1 and copy the file up.1 there. Now set you environment variable MANPATH to :$HOME/man. Now you can just view the manpage by calling man up.

Pete's Linux Advent Calendar 2007

Comments? send mail to pkruse@arcor.de