TITLE:		The Man Hint
LFS VERSION:	any
AUTHOR:		Mark Hymers <markh@linuxfromscratch.org>

SYNOPSIS:	Formating and Compression issues for man pages

Note: This hint was previously maintained by 
Rudolf Floers <r.floers@web.de> 
and then by Gerard Beekmans <gerard@linuxfromscratch.org>.  
Thanks to both of them.  Any bugs, however, are still my responsibility!

HINT:

(1)  Compression of man pages

If you want to save a little diskspace, you can safely bzip2 or gzip all
manpages.   We used to recommend just using gzip /usr/share/man/*/* (or
the bzip2 equivalent) but that breaks symlinks.  Instead, you can use
the following script. 

(a copy is available from
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~markh/scripts/compman
if you want to avoid cutting and pasting it!)

==========================================================================
#!/bin/sh
#
# Compress (with bzip2 or gzip) all man pages in a hierarchy and
# update symlinks - By Marc Heerdink <marc@koelkast.net>.
# Modified to be able to gzip or bzip2 files as an option and to deal
# with all symlinks properly by Mark Hymers <markh@linuxfromscratch.org>
#
# WARNING: This script still can't cope with hard-links (suggestions are
# welcome on how to deal with this)
# The only time this should be a problem is if you have a symlink to a
# hardlink; but then, you're sick if you do that anyways :-)
#

if [ ! -d "$1" -o -z "$1" ] || [ "$2" != "bz2" -a "$2" != "gz" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 <dir> <bz2/gz>"
  exit 1
fi

for DIR in $1/man*; do
  cd $DIR

  for FILE in *; do

    if [ -L "$FILE" ]; then
        case $FILE in
        *.bz2)
            EXT=bz2 ;;
        *.gz)
            EXT=gz ;;
        *)
            EXT=none ;;
        esac

        if [ "$EXT" != "none" ]; then
            LINK=`ls -l $FILE |cut -d ">" -f2 |tr -d " " | sed s/.$EXT$//`
            NEWNAME=`echo "$FILE" | sed s/\.$EXT$//`
            mv "$FILE" "$NEWNAME"
            FILE="$NEWNAME"
        else
            LINK=`ls -l $FILE |cut -d ">" -f2 |tr -d " "`
        fi

        rm -f "$FILE" && ln -s "${LINK}.$2" "${FILE}.$2"
        echo "Relinked $FILE"

    elif [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
        case $FILE in
        *.bz2)
            bunzip2 $FILE
            FILE=`echo $FILE | sed s/\.bz2$//`
        ;;
        *.gz)
            gunzip $FILE
            FILE=`echo $FILE | sed s/\.gz$//`
        ;;
        esac

        case $2 in
        bz2)
            bzip2 "$FILE" && chmod 644 "${FILE}.${2}";;
        gz)
            gzip "$FILE" && chmod 644 "${FILE}.${2}";;
        esac

        echo "Compressed $FILE"

    fi

  done # for FILE
done # for DIR
==========================================================================

Don't forget to set the script to be executable and then run it using 
something like:
./compman /usr/share/man bz2

The first option is the tree of man pages to compress.
The second options is bz2 or gz; it tells the script which compression
you want to use.

(2)      cat pages

TO BE ADDED - There's a slight problem; I can't get it to work at the
moment.  Hopefully this'll get fixed soon!