General notes on the Minix 1.5 man command: Unix systems generally seem to keep man pages as individual files named according to the subject and the section, for example, rm.1, ls.1, chmod.2, etc., in directories named according to the manual section, such as man1/, man2/, etc. These files may not be not flat text, they may be compressed and/or they may need to be passed through a formatting program such as nroff. The Minix man files that are available over the net are tarred collections of such files (not compressed, but needing to be run through a formatting program). Minix 1.5 man files do it differently. The Minix 1.5.10 man command expects to find a single large flat text file for each man section. One could debate whether this is a good idea or not, but it isn't the way most other Unix systems do it. It is probably more practical for the very small file systems on the floppy-based PCs for which Minix was originally developed. The man index display (see below) is definitely a more friendly interface than the standard Unix man system, which won't give you much help if you don't already know which command you want to ask about. There isn't any documentation on the format of man files except what is inherent in the man.c source. The man files consist of keyword lines that begin with a "#" in the first column, followed by lines of text to be displayed when one of the keywords in the preceding keyword line is selected from the keyword menu or as an argument to the man command. The keyword lines are not displayed, but all lines of text up to but not including the next keyword line will be displayed. New articles may be added to a man file by concatenation, but if a keyword appears more than once only the last reference will be displayed. In use, the Minix 1.5.10 man command expects to find files man in the directory/usr/man. The command format is man [ [arg2]] If the command is given with no arguments a menu of the keywords in /usr/man/man1 is presented. If the commmand is given with one argument, if the argument is a suffix of a man file in /usr/man a menu of the keywords in man is presented. If the commmand is given with one argument, if the argument is not a suffix of a man file in /usr/man a search is made for an article with a keyword corresponding to arg1 in /usr/man/man1. If the command is given with two arguments the first argument is used to select a file /usr/man/man and the second argument is the keyword to search for. Articles can be paged through in the forward direction using the Enter key. Presentation of an article may be interrupted by the intr (Delete by default, may be changed with stty) key or the Q key. When in menu mode the menu will be presented each time an article is complete. The intr or Q key will exit from the menu back to the command line prompt. Man files from the net: For better or for worse, a decision seems to have been made that the man system of future versions of Minix will be the traditional Unix one, with a single file for each entry. This will make maintenance of the man files easier, but it does away with the menu display that beginners to Unix will probably find easier to use. Most of the man pages you get from the net will need to be processed in the following way to be used with the Minix 1.5 man command: 1. Convert each article to a flat ASCII file. (Maybe not as easy as it should be if Minix is the only Unix you have, since most of these files cannot be fully converted using only the Minix 1.5 nroff -man command.) 2. Add a line to the top of each article that begins with a pound sign "#" followed by all the names by which you want to retrieve that article. 3. Concatenate all the files for section 1 together and name the resulting file man1, man2, etc. Put all of them in the directory /usr/man. Two caveats: don't throw away the original tarred files you get from the net, since when you update to Minix 1.6 or later you'll need to have separate files for each topic. Also, be aware that the man files that have been posted to the net may actually be based on Minix 1.6.16 or a later version in which the action of each command may no longer be the same as in Minix 1.5.10. ---