A patch to man to handle "man.1"...

[Chuck Swiger]

Chris Doherty wrote:
[ ... ]
> seems pretty simple:
> 
> 1) first check to see if there's a manpage for the literal argument
>    (e.g. "ld-elf.so.1")
> 
> 2) if that fails, treat the trailing digit as a section
>    specifier--i.e. look for "ld-elf.so" in section 1.
> 
> 3) if that also fails, report that not only was there a "ld-elf.so.1" in
>    any section, but there was also no "ld-elf.so" in section 1.
> 
> does that cover all cases? seems like this is a useful syntax to add
> on--anything to make man(7) more usable is a good thing IMO. :-)

Thanks for the vote in favor of the proposed syntax, as well as for your 
thoughts about an implementation that would remain backwards compatible.

The only difficulty is that I would probably choose to re-write 'man' from 
scratch rather than try to make non-localized/extensive changes to the existing 
code.  This can be explained simply, even: the function is_section() has side 
effects and changes some global variable named 'longsec' which relates to the 
'shortsec' variable seen in my patch in ways that I don't want to understand 
further.  :-)

On the other hand, are there any other implementations of 'man' around?  I seem 
to recall something called 'polaris' which implemented browsable links between 
manpages (similar to GNU info pages, come to think of it)...?

-- 
-Chuck