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Full Discussion: How to write a UNIX man page
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users How to write a UNIX man page Post 302526966 by cambridge on Thursday 2nd of June 2011 03:36:46 AM
Old 06-02-2011
Java How to write a UNIX man page

I realise that with GNU 'info' a lot of developers become, dare I say it, quite lazy when it comes to providing a well written man page - and some argue they're not needed at all. But I find, in the products that I develop, that man pages are used more often for quick reference, and therefore the quality and usability of a product can be improved by providing well written man pages.

To that end, and because I've been writing man pages myself for over 10 years, I've decided to provide some notes for beginners on how to write your own man page. I hope this article is of help to the wider developer community:

Technical Prose: How to write a UNIX man page

Best regards,
Mark.
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DH_INSTALLMANPAGES(1)						     Debhelper						     DH_INSTALLMANPAGES(1)

NAME
dh_installmanpages - old-style man page installer (deprecated) SYNOPSIS
dh_installmanpages [debhelperoptions] [file...] DESCRIPTION
dh_installmanpages is a debhelper program that is responsible for automatically installing man pages into usr/share/man/ in package build directories. This is a DWIM-style program, with an interface unlike the rest of debhelper. It is deprecated, and you are encouraged to use dh_installman(1) instead. dh_installmanpages scans the current directory and all subdirectories for filenames that look like man pages. (Note that only real files are looked at; symlinks are ignored.) It uses file(1) to verify that the files are in the correct format. Then, based on the files' extensions, it installs them into the correct man directory. All filenames specified as parameters will be skipped by dh_installmanpages. This is useful if by default it installs some man pages that you do not want to be installed. After the man page installation step, dh_installmanpages will check to see if any of the man pages are .so links. If so, it changes them to symlinks. OPTIONS
file ... Do not install these files as man pages, even if they look like valid man pages. BUGS
dh_installmanpages will install the man pages it finds into all packages you tell it to act on, since it can't tell what package the man pages belong in. This is almost never what you really want (use -p to work around this, or use the much better dh_installman(1) program instead). Files ending in .man will be ignored. Files specified as parameters that contain spaces in their filenames will not be processed properly. SEE ALSO
debhelper(7) This program is a part of debhelper. AUTHOR
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> 8.9.0ubuntu2.1 2012-06-12 DH_INSTALLMANPAGES(1)
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