May 2005
Intermediate to advanced
560 pages
15h 18m
English
Content preview from Classic Shell ScriptingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Manual-Page Syntax Checking
Checking correct formatting of manual pages is usually done visually, with printed output from either of these commands:
groff -man -Tps pathfind.man | lp troff -man -Tpost pathfind.man | /usr/lib/lp/postscript/dpost | lp
or on the screen as ASCII or typeset material, with commands like this:
nroff -man pathfind.man | col | more groff -man -Tascii pathfind.man | more groff -man -TX100 pathfind.man &
The col command handles certain special escape sequences that nroff generates for horizontal and vertical motion. col is not needed for groff output.
Some Unix systems have a simple-minded syntax checker, checknr; the command:
checknr pathfind.man
produces no complaints on our systems. checknr is good at catching font mismatches, but knows little about the manual-page format.
Most Unix systems have deroff, which is a simple filter that strips troff markup. You can do a spellcheck like this:
deroff pathfind.man | spell
to avoid lots of complaints from the spellchecker about troff markup. Other handy tools for catching hard-to-spot errors in documentation are a doubled-word finder[8] and a delimiter-balance checker.[9]
[8] Available at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/dw/.
[9] Available at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/chkdelim/.
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.