Subject: Re: linux-doc: Missing man page references
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 1995 22:10:15 +0200

The idea of (optionally) building a complete database of manual pages
	is attractive if it can be done in reasonable time, i.e. if it is
	practical.  One possibility is to use mkid

Yes.

When I added the -K option to man, I also played for a while with
similar possibilities. (For example, "gindxbib -w" is also a
possibility; it indexes all man pages within a few seconds.)

My main problem is that I have difficulty in viewing precisely
how the user is going to use this possibility.

For example, if you want to find something about open, then
        % man -K open
will find you more than a hundred pages (I believe there were 144
under /usr/man and lots of others elsewhere.). It will ask interactively:
        % man -K 2 open
        /usr/man/man2/access.2? [ynq] n
        /usr/man/man2/accept.2? [ynq] n
        /usr/man/man2/termios.2? [ynq] n
        /usr/man/man2/open.2? [ynq]
and show the pages for which you answer yes.

There are really only few words that will be successful, in the
sense that one obtains a relatively short list of mostly relevant pages.
        % man -K ioctl
yields slightly over 20 pages.

So, maybe this is not a very useful option.
And if it is not used, then there is no point in first making an
index, that has to be updated each time new pages are added,
in order to save a minute that seldom time that someone
really wants to know about all man pages mentioning ulimit.

I hope someone will contradict me and tell that "man -K" really
is very useful.

Andries