The question is: how do you print only part of a man page?
Currently I do zcat manpage.1.gz | vim - and just remove everything I don't want to print. Then I pass that through groff and lpr. Are there better methods?
If you want to easily print a man doc I usually do it the graphical way:
man -Hfirefox command
Then you can print certain pages in your web browser. This isn't as powerful as doing it through the command line but it's a lot easier to get right since you can actually see what you're printing ahead of time. This may be important if you want to print a landscape document or something of that sort.
I know that you can print a whole man page at once, in plain monospaced text, by doing something like
man mc | col -b | lpr -P printername
Or to print it "pretty" (Serif font, bold, italics etc.) by doing
zcat /usr/share/man/man1/mc.1.gz | groff -man -Tps | lpr -P printername
As this basically sends a postscript file to the printer, you can also save it to a PostScript file by doing
zcat /usr/share/man/man1/mc.1.gz | groff -man -Tps > mc.ps
But I have no idea if you can easily extract a certain page, pages, or sections.
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1Some versions of the man command have a
-toption as a shortcut for outputting postscript so you don't have to find the.1.gzfile and type that long command, you can justman -t foo | lpr. On selecting sections, I doubt it can be done cleanly. – Alan Curry Aug 12 '12 at 19:00
How about:
man ls | sed -n "5, 8p;8q" > print_this.txt # get lines 5 to 8
Then print with
lp -d <printer> print_this.txt
(Hint: The option (-o) switches of lp are very useful!)
But better yet: open in your editor, then mark the region. In Emacs:
M-x man RET ls
Then
M-x print-region
For this to work, the variable printer-name must be set. Or, use switches to lpr. (I see that you do not use Emacs, but this is of course possible in your editor as well.)
answered Aug 12 '12 at 17:38
