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Creating a Linux Manual (man)
Page
by Subhasish
Ghosh
Few things separate an "average" Linux
user/programmer/administrator from a "good" one. When in trouble, having an
exact idea where to find help is one of them. And the most important tool in
finding help quickly are the manual pages that are included along with any Linux
distribution. So, any time you type in a command and it doesn't work, you just
type in "man command" and press enter and the manual (man for short) page
associated with it is invoked and comes up on the screen.
Rather than explain how to use man pages in this article
I'm going to provide a basic template that everyone can use to create
their own manual pages in a flash. Everyone seems to create his/her own Linux
applications nowadays, so why not provide a manual page along with it to look a
bit more professional?
First of al we need an application to write a manual
page about. Fortunatley I have had an awful time last week. My Linux-literate
pet cat "geeko" ran away from home (supposedly with his girlfriend) for the
fourth consecutive time. I was searching my Red Hat Linux distribution the other
day, if I could find some man page on "Life" and "How to fix cats!",
unfortunately I didn't find any.
So, I wrote an application (using C programming
language) that can predict, to a certain degree of accuracy, where a cat is at
any given point of time, provided a few parameters are provided while executing
the application. The application is called "catapp" and we will create an man
page for it here.
Structure of a Man page
If you are writing a new command or an application, you
should be creating a manual page to go with it. Most manual pages have the
following set pattern, which is of the form:
- Header
- Name
- Synopsis
- Description
- Options
- Resources
- Diagnostics
- See also
- Copyright
- Bugs
- Authors
Though
most manual pages have this above-mentioned pattern it isn't compulsory for
every manual page to be created in this way. You can always leave out sections
that are not relevant. Please note: The above mentioned pattern for a manual
page is for a "Linux" manual page. In Unix systems, the pattern is slightly
different. In Unix systems, the pattern is as given below: 1. Header 2. Name 3.
Synopsis 4. Description 5. Options 6. Files 7. See also 8. Bugs
We will be dealing with Linux manual pages in this
article.
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