Find software package with greatest number of system manual pages

Question

I want to output the name of the installed software package that owns the greatest number of system manual pages. Is there a command to do this?

Answer 1

For Debian-based systems, to get the package with the most installed man pages:

dpkg -S '/usr/share/man/*.gz' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'

To get the package with the most available man pages (whether installed or not):

apt-file search /usr/share/man | cut -d: -f1 | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'

On my system, the package with the most available man-pages is linux-manual-3.2.

Explanation

Taking the pipeline used to create pkg one step at a time:

• apt-file search /usr/share/man

  This returns the packages and file names for all files in /usr/share/man hierarchy.

• cut -d: -f1

  This removes the file names for the list so that we just have a list of packages.

• uniq -c

  This counts the number of man pages in each package. (Often, one needs to sort before using uniq -c but apt-find produces output one package at at time making that step unnecessary.)

• sort -rn

  This does a numeric sort in descending order so that the package with the most man pages is at the top and those with the least are at the bottom.

• head -1

  This picks the first line which the one with the most man pages.

• awk '{print $2}'

  This selects the package name from that line.

I found it interesting to use just a part of this pipeline:

apt-file search /usr/share/man | cut -d: -f1 | uniq -c | sort -rn | less

This displays, via less, the list of packages sorted in descending order by number of man pages. On my system, the top five are:

   3453 linux-manual-3.2
   3384 liblapack-doc-man
   2350 freebsd-manpages
   1916 manpages-ja-dev
   1905 manpages-fr-dev

Answer 2

On my gentoo box command

qfile /usr/share/man/*/* | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

gives

    864 sys-libs/ncurses
   1139 sys-apps/man-pages-posix
   1283 dev-libs/openssl
   2209 sys-apps/man-pages
   2246 x11-libs/libxcb

But after including all subdirectories with a little help of ** pattern

qfile /usr/share/man/**/* | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

man-pages wins:

    933 sys-libs/ncurses
   1142 sys-apps/man-pages-posix
   1352 dev-libs/openssl
   2254 x11-libs/libxcb
   2310 sys-apps/man-pages

Answer 3

Alternative for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint...

$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/info && 
  grep -c '^/usr/share/man/.*/' *.list | sort -t: -k2rn | less -XF

Gives for me:

manpages-dev.list:1962
libssl-doc.list:1171
tcl8.6-doc.list:813
perl-doc.list:719
libdatetime-locale-perl.list:470
tcllib.list:407

Answer 4

This solution worked on CentOS and RHEL machines.

rpm -qf $(man -w $(compgen -ac)) | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -1

I can generate the list of all the commands that are available in the system using compgen -ac. Now, man -w can tell the corresponding man page of this command.

I give this man page as input to rpm -qf which will give me the package which owns it. Now, I sort the output and then find the total occurrences and then get the first line which will give me the package name with the count of man pages corresponding to this package. After I run the above command, the output that I get is,

329 netpbm-progs-10.47.05-11.el6.x86_64

So, the above output indicates that I have 329 manual page entries for the commands provided by the package netpbm-progs-10.47.05-11.el6.x86_64 which is the highest in my system.

References

https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/man_pages_other.html