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>10. How do I get a plain text man
page without all that ^H^_ stuff?</H1
><P
>Have a look at <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>col</TT
>(1), because
<TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>col</TT
> can filter out backspace sequences. Just in
case you can't wait that long:</P
><P
><TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>funnyprompt$ groff -t -e -mandoc -Tascii manpage.1 |
col -bx > manpage.txt</TT
></P
><P
>The <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>-t</TT
> and <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>-e</TT
> switches
tell <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>groff</TT
> to preprocess using
<TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>tbl</TT
> and <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>eqn</TT
>. This is overkill
for man pages that don't require preprocessing but it does no
harm apart from a few CPU cycles wasted. On the other hand, not
using <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>-t</TT
> when it is actually required does harm:
the table is terribly formatted. You can even find out (well,
"guess" is a better word) what command is needed to
format a certain <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>groff</TT
> document (not just man
pages) by issuing</P
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><PRE
CLASS="PROGRAMLISTING"
>funnyprompt$ grog /usr/man/man7/signal.7
groff -t -man /usr/man/man7/signal.7</PRE
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> </P
><P
>"Grog" stands for "GROff Guess", and it
does what it says--guess. If it were perfect we wouldn't need
options any more. I've seen it guess incorrectly on macro
packages and on preprocessors. Here is a little perl script I wrote
that can delete the page headers and footers, thereby saving you a
few pages (and mother nature a tree) when printing long and
elaborate man pages. Save it in a file named
<TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>strip-headers</TT
> & chmod 755.</P
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><PRE
CLASS="PROGRAMLISTING"
> #!/usr/bin/perl -wn
# make it slurp the whole file at once:
undef $/;
# delete first header:
s/^\n*.*\n+//;
# delete last footer:
s/\n+.*\n+$/\n/g;
# delete page breaks:
s/\n\n+[^ \t].*\n\n+(\S+).*\1\n\n+/\n/g;
# collapse two or more blank lines into a single one:
s/\n{3,}/\n\n/g;
# see what's left...
print;</PRE
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><P
>You have to use it as the first filter after the
<TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>man</TT
> command as it relies on the number of
newlines being output by <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>groff</TT
>. For
example:</P
><P
><TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>funnyprompt$ man bash | strip-headers | col -bx >
bash.txt</TT
></P
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