How to get a stdout when CL doesn't provide one.

Anyway, how do I pipe out afconvert -h to a text or PDF file? I can't seem to get that to work.

Re-direct stderr:

afconvert -h 2> ~/Desktop/afconvert.txt

Since the -h, help option, may go thru standard out or standard error, you could consider redirecting both to file.

In Bash and Zsh ->

command -h &>command.txt

This is more portible and should work with any Bourne-like shell ->

command -h > command.txt 2>&1

And should you be a Csh user then ->

command -h >& command.txt

Why don't you just get Bwana, or even better, Dash.

Then just re-direct stderr.

Remember what you are doing here is capturing the help output of afconvert not its man page.

The man page for afconvert is minimal to be kind, it basically just tells you to run afconvert -h. So if you want to be able to look at afconvert's help output capture it as Tony and Mark suggested.

"man -t uses groff -Tps -mandoc -c to format the manual page passing the output to stdout", so we can do the same:

afconvert -h 2>&1 | groff -Tps | pstopdf -i -o afconvert.pdf

Hello

Try something like this.

#!/bin/bash
(
    exec 2>&1
    afconvert -h
    echo
    afconvert -hf
) | groff -Tps | pstopdf -i -o ~/desktop/afconvert.pdf

Good luck,

H

Is it doable?

Try this:

cat <(afconvert -h 2>&1) <(echo) <(afconvert -hf 2>&1) | groff -Tps | pstopdf -i -o afconvert.pdf

[Note: while it worked, I get a groff error: "<standard input>:161: cannot use character `0' as a starting delimiter", however, the PDF file is created as intended. The error can be suppressed with -E: groff -Tps -E]

Found the source of the error.

In afconvert -hf, these 2 lines (line 32 and 33) are causing the groff error:

LEI32 LEF32 LEF64 'ms\x00\x02' 'ms\x00\x11'

'ms\x001' 'paac' 'samr' 'ulaw' 'zaac' 'zach'

This is due to the escape charater \x

So, there is an error in the PDF as these 2 lines will be changed to:

LEI32 LEF32 LEF64 ’ms02’ ’ms01’

’ms01’ ’paac’ ’samr’ ’ulaw’ ’zaac’ ’zach’

So, with sed, this can be corrected by escaping the escapes:

cat <(afconvert -h 2>&1) <(echo) <(afconvert -hf 2>&1) | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g' | groff -Tps | pstopdf -i -o afconvert.pdf

It's not difficult to plugin the output from afconvert -h and afconvert -hf into the man page ( a copy of course). You could learn ancient typesetting and actually produce a useful man page. You could man -t the copy man page and pipe to pstopdf or consider replacing the useless man page.

Just realized, don't need cat:

( afconvert -h 2>&1; echo; afconvert -hf 2>&1 ) | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g' | groff -Tps | pstopdf -i -o afconvert.pdf