Didn't see an answer yet so let me try.
1. man -t routes the output of the man page through groff which defaults
to making it into Postscript and then Jonathan piped that postscript
into the OSX Preview app. Gives you a nice formatted output in a more
Mac friendly viewer.
2. I think most of your question will be answered if you do a "man
open". The open command opens some file just as though you had done an
Command-O in the finder on it. The -a modifier specifies which
application to use to open the file and the -f option tells it to read
input from standard in rather than a file, which would be needed to
accept input from the pipe's output.
CB
On 2/9/12 6:11 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Hi Johnathan,
Looking at the command you gave:
man -t bash | open -a preview -f
I have 2 questions.
1. man bash or man -t bash. What is groff? From man, I don't become any wiser.
It seems that man -t bash, will have man pass its output to groff, rather than
to stout, while groff in turn, does pass it to stdout with a lot of
modifications. What is it that I see, when I enter man -t? Groff is a front end
for something else that I completely don't understand. Question here is: what
are you doing, using man -t?
2. The output from man, traveling through gruff by means of the man -t option,
is then piped into the preview command. So far so good. But what is the -f
preview option for? I googled a lot but where do you find the preview mac
command line options? Question here is: what is -f doing in preview?
I understand the -a switch for open. If this were not in place, then the open
command, a mac specific one I know now, would never know where to look. -a
Specifies to look inside the applications folder, wherever that resides. Can
you please answer my 2 questions above? It looks like each new answer poses
new questions, but that will settle down over time I hope.
Paul.
On Feb 9, 2012, at 4:10 AM, Jonathan C. Cohn wrote:
The prompt string is defined in the variable PS1 for the bourne shell. I
believe that bash (bourne again shell ) also uses this variable. Note: you
only need to set it, no need to export it to the environment.
First check to verify the shell you are running
echo$shell
then run a man page on the shell (if you want to get fancy , then code like the
below should bring up the man page in preview...
man -t bash | open -a preview -f
But then again, google can find man pages, and there is actually a option in Google
settings to indicate that you want a UNIX man page when you enter "man XXX" in
the google search bar.
Best wishes,
Jonathan C. Cohn
[email protected]
On Feb 8, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Dear list,
I am learning to change the terminal prompt. It now includes my machine name
and my user name, which is what I want to get rid of. I think that the prompt
is contained in an environment variable. I found that I can look at them by
using env without parameters, and that works. However, prompt is not in here.
Where do I need to look, to find the placeholders string that gives me my
prompt?
Paul.
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