Creating Manpages with groff
A Call for New Manpages!
Author(s): HEIKE JURZIK
Do have difficulty remembering command syntax? It often pays to check the manpage. In this issue of Command Line,we look at how to create your own manpages,and how to convert manpages to other formats.
Good documentation is almost as important as good programming. It even makes sense to document the major functions in the most trivial of your own scripts, to save you from racking your brains later when you need to change something. Manpages give users tips on usage and details on command syntax options. Some manpages also include examples or references to related tools. Users can read manpages in a terminal window, and they can convert a manpage quickly and easily to another format such as HTML, PostScript, or PDF. Manual pages are traditionally created using the text formating tool groff. The first version of this program appeared on legacy Unix systems, where it was known as roff (= “run off”). Later developments of the document formatter were called nroff and troff; groff is the GNU version for the current crop of Linux systems. This article shows how to use groff to write a manpage and how to convert that manpage into other formats.
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