m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text

By Vasudev Ram

mu image attribution

I was using this Unix utility called m today, as I often do, when working on Linux. It's a shell script that lets you save the man pages for one or more Unix commands, system calls or other topics, to text files, after cleaning up the man command output to remove formatting meant for emphasis, printing, etc.

I had first written m a while ago, on Unix boxes that I used to work on earlier, as opposed to Linux, which I use these days.
At that time it was needed, because on some Unix versions, man page output used to be formatted for printers (by text-processing tools such as nroff and troff. These tools would insert extra formatting characters in the output, for effects like bold and underscore, that made it less easy to read the text file on screen, if you simply redirected it to a file, and opened it in a text editor. (Reading the page via the man command itself would work fine.)

Here is the m script, shown by cat [1]:

cat ~/bin/m

cat displays:

mkdir -p ~/man
for i
do
    man $i | col -bx > ~/man/$i.m
done

[1] Check out "useless use of cat" at the cat link above.

(A less-known fact is that "for i" is shorthand for "for i in $*", i.e. it iterates over all the command-line arguments to the script. Not to be confused with "for i in *" which will iterate over all the filenames in the current directory, because the * expands to that.)

m uses the convention of putting all the text files that it creates (one per command-line argument), into a directory called man, under your home directory, i.e. ~/man. If the directory does not exist, it will be created.

You have to save the above script as a file called m in a directory that is in your Unix PATH. Creating a directory called ~/bin is a good choice - your local bin directory:

mkdir ~/bin
cp m ~/bin  # Assumes you created m in your current directory.

and make it executable using chmod:

chmod u+x ~/man/m

Now if I run m as follows, to generate (as cleaned-up text) the man pages for, say, the fopen and fclose C stdio library functions,

m fopen fclose

it creates the text files fopen.m and fclose.m in my ~/man directory.
I can then open fopen.m with the view command (vi in read-only mode):

view ~/man/fopen.m

Here is a screenshot of the file opened in vi(ew):

Enjoy.

P.S. If you are new to vi and want to get up and running with it fast, check out my vi quickstart tutorial. I first wrote it for a couple of friends, Windows system administrator colleagues of mine, who had been given additional charge of a few Unix boxes, at their request, to help them to get up to speed with vi. They later said it helped with that.

P.P.S. If you like short words and commands like m, check out the Japanese word mu for some interesting points.

A few excerpts:
[
The Japanese and Korean term mu (Japanese: 無; Korean: 무) or Chinese wú (traditional Chinese: 無; simplified Chinese: 无) meaning "not have; without" is a key word in Buddhism, especially Zen traditions.
...
Some English translation equivalents of wú or mu 無 are:
"no", "not", "nothing", or "without"[2]
nothing, not, nothingness, un-, is not, has not, not any[3]
[1] Nonexistence; nonbeing; not having; a lack of, without. [2] A negative. [3] Caused to be nonexistent. [4] Impossible; lacking reason or cause. [5] Pure human awareness, prior to experience or knowledge. This meaning is used especially by the Chan school.
...
The character wu 無 originally meant "dance" and was later used as a graphic loan for wu "not". The earliest graphs for 無 pictured a person with outstretched arms holding something (possibly sleeves, tassels, ornaments) and represented the word wu "dance; dancer".
...
The Gateless Gate, which is a 13th-century collection of Chan or Zen kōans, uses the word wu or mu in its title (Wumenguan or Mumonkan 無門關) and first kōan case ("Joshu's Dog" 趙州狗子). Chinese Chan calls the word mu 無 "the gate to enlightenment".[9] The Japanese Rinzai school classifies the Mu Kōan as hosshin 発心 "resolve to attain enlightenment", that is, appropriate for beginners seeking kenshō "to see the Buddha-nature"'.[10]
...
In the original text, the question is used as a conventional beginning to a question-and-answer exchange (mondo). The reference is to the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra[14] which says for example:
In this light, the undisclosed store of the Tathagata is proclaimed: "All beings have the Buddha-Nature".[15]
...
In Robert M. Pirsig's 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, mu is translated as "no thing", saying that it meant "unask the question". He offered the example of a computer circuit using the binary numeral system, in effect using mu to represent high impedance:
...
"Mu" may be used similarly to "N/A" or "not applicable," a term often used to indicate the question cannot be answered because the conditions of the question do not match the reality.
...
Because of this meaning, programming language Perl 6 uses "Mu" for the root of its type hierarchy.[23]
]

The image at the top of the post, is the character mu in seal script.

P.P.P.S. Really the last this time :) Another m-word:

Check out Muji - simplicity is deceptively complex.

Enjoy.

- Vasudev Ram - Online Python training and consulting

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