List of terminal commands

I cannot get your HTML script to do anything. No apparent errors but I cannot find any output.

My script should have generated a tmp.html file in the current working directory.

If you are saying you have a tmp.html file, but it is empty, that is unexpected.

That would say that awk did not find any matches to the selection string:

/(1|(6|(8/

And if there were a copy & paste error, it is more likely awk would have detected some kind of syntax error.

Anyway, I've reposted the little script with the modifications to not be overly agressive on what it selects.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
apropos ' ' | awk ' /(1|(6|(8/ {
 match($0,/ - /)
 cmd = substr($0,1,RSTART-1)
 therest = substr($0,RSTART)
 page = cmd
 sub(/(.*/,"",page)
 sub(/ *$/,"",cmd)
 printf("%s%s
   ", page, cmd, therest)
}' >tmp.html

If you feel like pursuing this further, post your version of the script between a pair of

tags. For example:

...
... your version of the script here ...
...
{code}

Yes, often mentioned as the solution to everything but my concerns about it are:

1 - slow

I didn't think it was that slow (personal opinion). I'm unlikely to use it, as I just tend to use man, apropos, and Google, but when I tried the dcl example it completed very quickly.

2 - source hot links (Xr) not used

not sure what that means.

3 - too little info per screen due to large font and incorrectly interpreted source CRs - see my earlier post.

It didn't seem too bad to me, but again, I'm unlikely to use it, and besides it is more important how the reader likes the information to be displayed, so your #3 comment is perfectly valid.

4 - too much to type each time - I prefer the simplicity of m dscl

That is easily fixed by creating a script or an alias. For example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
TMP=/tmp/$1.pdf
/usr/bin/man -t "$1" | pstopdf -i -o "$TMP"
open "$TMP"

Create a file with this script in it (call it mp). Make the script executable (chmod +x mp). Put the mp script in a directory contained in your PATH environment variable, or add a personal script directory to PATH.

Now it should be as easy as using the man command to get pdf'ed man pages.

mp dscl

Assuming you like the pdf styled man pages that is.

Hi Bob,

I think your script needs a tiny adjustment, the full path of the 'pstopdf':

#!/usr/bin/env bash
TMP=/tmp/$1.pdf
/usr/bin/man -t "$1" | /usr/bin/pstopdf -i -o "$TMP"
open "$TMP"

Re 1 - slow:

Starting with Terminal open and all other applications closed this method took 15 seconds after hitting return in the Terminal. It also required a manual click on the PDF. Clearly this depends upon computer speed but it is common, while working with the terminal, to decide to look at a manual page. The time may have been extended by Adobe reader being set as my default PDF viewer. Under the same test conditions ManOpen took 3 seconds and Terminal took about 1.5 seconds.

I'll bet it was one of those "two 733 MHz G4s", and Adobe Acrobat Reader that caused the slowness.

On my 4 year old white MacBook 2GHz/2GB intel Core 2 Duo (with an upgraded 500GB 7200 RPM disk), it took about 5 seconds, including starting Preview. With Preview up and running, the next attempt took less than 2 seconds.

If on your systems Preview opens faster vs Acrobat, you could modify the open command to specify Preview, by adding a "-a Preview" option. See below:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
TMP=/tmp/$1.pdf
/usr/bin/man -t "$1" | /usr/bin/pstopdf -i -o "$TMP"
open -a Preview "$TMP"

However, if man pages in PDF do not provide the functionality you need, then this has just been an educational exercise which can often times provide benefits down the road.

Thanks for this and your various other pieces of useful code.

Your welcome.

Message was edited by: BobHarris

I have found your posts to be very useful.

I am beginning to wonder if there is a definition of OS X 'Terminal Commands'.

No. Actually thinking of commands as "Terminal" commands can lead you astray.

The Terminal is just a semi-dumb program that passes keyboard input to the Unix shell you are using (there are many Unix shells), and the Terminal displays text the shell, or commands run by the shell send to standard output and standard error. Besides that the Terminal does not do a lot more with respect to Unix commands.

The Shell (default is bash - Bourne Again Shell; named after Steven Bourne, creator of the first popular shell called the Bourne Shell or sh). Anyway there is also the ksh (Korn) shell, zsh shell, the csh shell, and the tcsh shell. There are most likely others, but these are the most popular.

Anyway, the shell is what gives the command prompt. It looks at the first white space separated thing you type as the command. If it is not a reserved statement (if/then/else/fi, case/esac, variable=value, etc...), or a build-in command (cd, export, set, print, echo, etc...), then the shell searches a list of directories stored in the PATH environment variable checking to see if the command you typed is the name of a file stored in one of those directories. If it finds a match, it creates a subprocess, and tells the operating system to execute that file. The operating system will determine if it is a program or a script and do the right thing.

The user can modify the PATH environment variable to include additional directories in PATH so that even more programs and scripts can be considered programs.

And if the command is not in PATH, then the user can always just type the full path to the program. For example:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app/Contents/MacOS/Screen Sharing

The bottom line is that there is no definitive list of Unix commands on any Unix based operating system.

Perhaps wrongly I was working on the assumption that it included commands which would do anything if used in the Terminal. Any thoughts on this?

I was aware that apropos ' ' included most manual pages but could not see an easy way to reliably weed out only items not included in my definition. At least this method was not as bad as the long Apple list which includes manual pages for many items not on a standard installation.

Actaully apropos only displays the man pages that are found via the MANPATH environmet variable when the whatis database was created, and if MANPATH does not exist, then the default man page directory list.

And even if you find every last man page and make sure the correct directory is in the MANPATH environment variable, that only covers commands which have man pages. Any commands/programs/scripts you create may not have man pages, and there 3rd party programs you might install that may or may not have man pages.

Then again, even if you do not find everything, you still have a lot of man pages at your disposal, 95% of you will most likely rarely if ever use. 🙂

You are correct about the G4. It is surprising how well it normally works with Leopard - starting Adobe Reader is not one of its strong points.

At this stage, we are just experimenting for the fun of it 🙂

I have little interest in anything without hot links especially PDFs but I tried your code and got:

bash-3.2$ /usr/bin/man -t "$1" | /usr/bin/pstopdf -i -o "$TMP"
No manual entry for
%%[ Error: ioerror; OffendingCommand: put ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%
/usr/bin/pstopdf failed on PS read from stdin with error code -30998
bash-3.2$

That was suppose to be a script where you pass the name of the command you wish to get a pdf man page for

cat <<EOD >m2p
#!/usr/bin/env bash
TMP=/tmp/$1.pdf
/usr/bin/man -t "$1" | /usr/bin/pstopdf -i -o "$TMP"
open -a Preview "$TMP"
EOD
chmod +x m2p
./m2p cp
./m2p dscl
./m2p nano
./m2p find
etc...

Please take a look at the Clix utility:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/clix.html

Roberto