[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-02-02 17:58, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <kejegi$d88$1 at iltempo.update.uu.se>,
> 	Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
>> On 2013-02-02 16:05, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> In article <nospam-942E9C.15475402022013 at news.chingola.ch>,
>>> 	Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> writes:
>>>> In article <an0qmpFduj7U4 at mid.individual.net>,
>>>>    billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Just out of curiosity, I just looked at a couple of manpages on a
>>>>> FreeBSD system and none of them exhibited this straight-right-margin
>>>>> of which you speak.
>>>>
>>>> uname -sr
>>>> FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p1
>>>> man bash
>>>>
>>>> DESCRIPTION
>>>>     Bash  is  an  sh-compatible  command language interpreter that executes
>>>>     commands read from the standard input or from a file.  Bash also incor-
>>>>     porates useful features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh).
>>>>
>>>>     Bash  is  intended  to  be a conformant implementation of the Shell and
>>>>     Utilities portion  of  the  IEEE  POSIX  specification  (IEEE  Standard
>>>>     1003.1).  Bash can be configured to be POSIX-conformant by default.
>>>>
>>>> (edited to strip first 5 spaces of each line to avoid wrapping in this
>>>> post)
>>>>
>>>> Note how multiple spaces are distributed along the lines to get right
>>>> justification.
>>>>
>>>
>>> MAN(1)                  FreeBSD General Commands Manual                 MAN(1)
>>>
>>> NAME
>>>        man -- format and display the on-line manual pages
>>>
>>> SYNOPSIS
>>>        man [-adfhkotw] [-m arch[:machine]] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager]
>>>            [-S list] [section] name ...
>>>
>>> DESCRIPTION
>>>        The man utility formats and displays the on-line manual pages.  This ver-
>>>        sion knows about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can
>>>        have your own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program
>>>        you like to display the formatted pages.  If section is specified, man
>>>        only looks in that section of the manual.  You may also specify the order
>>>        to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the
>>>        source files via command line options or environment variables.  If
>>>        enabled by the system administrator, formatted man pages will also be
>>>        compressed with the ``/usr/bin/gzip -c'' command to save space.
>>>
>>>
>>> Notice that this one doesn't.  :-)  Looks like it depends on who wrote the
>>> man page and being as we all know where bash originated, is it any wonder
>>> they did a bad job on the man page?
>>
>> It normally doesn't. Man-pages are created through nroff (or something
>> similar), which usually is setup to do a straight right margin when
>> creating man-pages. Of course, you can have man-pages formatted with
>> some other macros than the standard man-macros, and you could even chew
>> through the man sources and just strip away formatting altogether and
>> just output the text.
>> But no person I've ever known, have ever formatted the man-pages by hand.
>
> Well, someone had to write the bash man page.  If the page does right
> justification that person must have told it to.  The fact that one
> page does and another doesn't shows that it is the choice of the
> guy who writes the nroff (a dying art, for sure).  But, as I said,
> I sreally see no difference between when one does or doesn't as
> justification neither adds nor detracts from the actual content.

Not the one who wrote the bash man-page, but the one who wrote the nroff 
man macros... man-pages are expected to use certain macros. Exactly what 
those do can be changed... You don't change the man sources if you want 
a uniform different style to your man-pages. You change the man macros...

If you want to, I can post the source code for the bash man-page. But 
I'm sure you can find it on the net. I can also post the NetBSD nroff 
man macros, if you want to see those. Or the resulting output from the 
combination. Or, if you prefer, the html output you get by a different 
set of macros produced from the same sources on the same system.

:-)

But I'm sure you actually already know all this...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol