From: John Gordon on
In <7vl3guFs3gU1(a)mid.individual.net> Phred Phungus <Phred(a)example.invalid> writes:

> fp = popen ("mv *.c backups1/.", "r");

Why are you capturing the output of the mv command? popen() does not return
error output, only standard output. What standard output are you hoping to
capture?

--
John Gordon A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs
gordon(a)panix.com B is for Basil, assaulted by bears
-- Edward Gorey, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies"

From: John Gordon on
In <7vl2bqFl6mU1(a)mid.individual.net> Phred Phungus <Phred(a)example.invalid> writes:

> This shows a couple of the frustrations I have with man pages. When
> they are slightly out of the ordinary, I don't have them. Furthermore,

If your system is missing man pages, that's the fault of the sysadmin, not
the man page itself. (I know this doesn't help you, but let's place blame
where it belongs.)

> they take over the terminal, and though they be 1500 lines long, I can't
> use the scroll bar.

By default, man pages are displayed via the "more" command, which allows
only for forward scrolling. If you like, you can use other programs to
display the results:

man fork | less
man fork | cat

"less" is similar to "more" but allows for backwards scrolling, and "cat"
just dumps the entire page to your screen thus allowing you to use the
scrollbars on your window.

--
John Gordon A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs
gordon(a)panix.com B is for Basil, assaulted by bears
-- Edward Gorey, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies"

From: Ersek, Laszlo on
In article <7vl2bqFl6mU1(a)mid.individual.net>, Phred Phungus <Phred(a)example.invalid> writes:

> I've been using this place for reference:
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/fork.html
>
> , and have gone the next step to download the current unix
> specification, but it comes in a form that I don't see how to use:
>
> [...]
>
> After extraction, it looks like this:
>
> [...]
>
> , so I know the content is there; it's just in dozens of different
> folders and html pages.

If you try the following files under the extracted root folder, they are
all good places to start.

index.html
webindex.html

The latter features a search box too, which searches The Open Group's
database. The links returned are in the http:// scheme, not file://. If
you need local search capabilty, just extract the tarball somewhere, and
index it with one of the many desktop search apps. "recoll" is an
example.

----v----
Package: recoll
Description: Personal full text search package with a QT GUI
This package is a personal full text search package is based on a very strong
backend (Xapian), for which it provides an easy to use and feature-rich
interface.
.
Features:
* QT-based GUI
* Supports the following document types (and their compressed versions)
- Natively: text, html, OpenOffice files, maildir and mailbox (Mozilla and
----^----


.... Be more polite. You can learn a great deal in this group (not from
me), so even pure self-interest dictates that you don't alienate people.

Cheers,
lacos
From: Scott Lurndal on
John Gordon <gordon(a)panix.com> writes:
>In <7vl2bqFl6mU1(a)mid.individual.net> Phred Phungus <Phred(a)example.invalid> writes:
>
>> This shows a couple of the frustrations I have with man pages. When
>> they are slightly out of the ordinary, I don't have them. Furthermore,
>
>If your system is missing man pages, that's the fault of the sysadmin, not
>the man page itself. (I know this doesn't help you, but let's place blame
>where it belongs.)

use 'xman'. It should be installed on most ubuntu systems.

scott
From: Alan Curry on
In article <7vl2bqFl6mU1(a)mid.individual.net>,
Phred Phungus <Phred(a)example.invalid> wrote:
|Ian Collins wrote:
|> Phred Phungus wrote:
|>>
|>> I don't post to be told that I'm putting forth no effort. Why don't
|>> you tell me what I didn't read today,
|>
|> One of W. Richard Stevens Unix programming books? They will give you
|> the background to make better sense of man pages and other documentation.
|>
|
|Thx, Ian, I just ordered it. I only have one unix reference right now,
|and it's more from a user's standpoint.

Unix doesn't enforce any strict boundary between "users" and "programmers",
but based on posts like this one, I think you need to become a bit better at
the "user" stuff before you have a chance at the "programmer" stuff.

|
|http://i46.tinypic.com/33db7nq.png
|
|This shows a couple of the frustrations I have with man pages. When
|they are slightly out of the ordinary, I don't have them. Furthermore,

Unfortunately, some Linux distributions don't consider the system man pages
mandatory so you have to go find them. If you don't know how to search your
distribution's package list to find the package that will install the basic
C library man pages for you, make that a priority.

If that fails (and it definitely should not!) you can go straight to the
original source, which is the directory /pub/linux/docs/man-pages on
ftp.xx.kernel.org (xx is your country code).

|they take over the terminal, and though they be 1500 lines long, I can't
|use the scroll bar.

This is where you really revealed how far behind you are. The scroll bar on a
terminal emulator is only for scrolling back to see the stuff that's already
been printed and scrolled off the screen. It's not part of the interface to
any program currently running on the terminal.

Terminal scrollback is useful after you run a command that spewed too much
output too fast for you to read it. When you have a well-behaved program
(like "man") that prints its output one screenful at a time through a pager,
you don't need scrollback. The pager itself not only handles basic scrolling
up and down through the content, but also does more stuff like searching
which you will want to do pretty soon.

Your pager, your editor, and your shell are things you should study in
detail, because they are the 3 most important pieces of the unix user
interface. They are also, not coincidentally, 3 pieces for which there are
many alternatives. more/less, vi/emacs, bash/zsh, etc.

If you can't figure out how to scroll and search in the pager which displays
your man pages, you are still in unix kindergarten. That's the stage in which
you really need to be getting help from someone who's there with you, looking
over your shoulder and correcting you when you are doing something completely
wacky like trying to use a terminal scrollbar when there's nothing in the
scrollback buffer! Long-distance help through usenet is too slow for that.

And don't worry about fork() yet. You're expected to go through a phase of
not getting it. Everyone does. Eventually it hits you all at once. It's a
major milestone in understanding unix. You've got some other milestones to
pass first.

--
Alan Curry