How to dump a man page?

Question

How can I 'cat' a man page like I would 'cat' a file to get just a dump of the contents?

Answer 1

To get an ASCII man page file, without the annoying backspace/underscore attempts at underlining, and weird sequences to do bolding:

man ksh | col -b > ksh.txt

Answer 2

First of all, the man files are usually just gziped text files stored somewhere in your file system. Since your mileage will vary finding them and you probably wanted the processed and formatted version that man gives you instead of the source, you can just dump them with the man tool. By looking at man man, I see that you can change the program used to view man pages with the -P flag like this:

man -P cat command_name

It's also worth noting that man automatically detects when you pipe its output instead of viewing it on the screen, so if you are going to process it with something else you can skip straight to that step like so:

man command_name | grep search_string

or to dump TO a file:

man command_name > formatted_man_page.txt

Answer 3

Man pages are usually troff pre-processed files, and you can get to the plain text with,

groff -t -e -mandoc -Tascii manpage.1 | col -bx > manpage.txt

groff is a wrapper for troff.

More information here.

You might need to use gzip to uncompress the man page files first, and you'll still have plenty of formatting information in the output.

Answer 4

I do this all the time. This command line makes me happy:

man man | col -bx > man.txt

col -b removes backspaces.

col -bx also replaces tabs with spaces which is my strong preference.

If I want the text to be formatted to a width of my preference while reading, then I change the command to this:

MANWIDTH=10000 man man | col -bx > man.txt

Answer 5

Just use the man command - you can pipe the output into other things just as you can with cat for a file.

Answer 6

If you just want to cat a manpage, you can simply pipe it to cat:

man ls | cat

---

If you want to dump its content to a file:

man ls > ls_manpage_dump.txt

Answer 7

A possible helper might look as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

{
    # We can safely export the following variables unless we source this file
    export TERM=dumb
    export MANPAGER=cat
    export MANWIDTH=100

    # Here is how it works:
    #
    # 1. 'col -b' removes backspaces, 'col -x' replaces tabs with spaces
    # 2. Drop lines from the top up to USAGE word
    # 3. Drop two lines from the bottom
    man "$1"                  \
        | col -bx             \
        | grep -A 100 USAGE   \
        | sed '$d' | sed '$d'
} > "$2"

Usage:

$ mandump ksh ksh.txt