Re: Inconsistent macro notation in manual pages.

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:38:39 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260228213839.zyj5mzwir5vuzqkh@illithid>

Hi Alexis of the flexible beast,

At 2026-02-28T17:01:19+1100, Alexis wrote:
> "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> writes:
> >     # Search for a word in a given man page.
> >     #
> >     # Equivalent examples (if using man-db man): tagman am 7     groff
> >     #                                            tagman am
> > 'groff(7)'
> >     #                                            tagman am -s 7
> > groff
> >     tagman () {
> >       word=$1
> >       shift
> >       man "$@" | "${PAGER:-less}" -c
> > '+/[^a-zA-Z0-9]'"$word"'[^a-zA-Z0-9]'
> >     }
> 
> As a data point, this nifty function overall worked for me with mandoc
> man(1) as well, although:
> 
> * mandoc man(1) doesn't like 'groff(7)' as an argument, resulting  in
>  a "No entry for groff(7) in the manual" error. (`man 7 groff`
>  works fine.)

Right.  Support for that form of man page specification is unique to
man-db man, as far as I know.  Colin Watson would be the authority here.

> * i've been trialing using most(1) instead of less(1), and the
>  function doesn't work with the former.

Sounds like it doesn't attempt to support even the relatively small
number of command-line options specified for more(1) by the POSIX
standard.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/more.html

Maybe doing so is not part of its mission, or the program simply needs
further development.

Regards,
Branden

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)