mandoc-tools – tools for searching and retrieving UNIX manuals

This code has been deprecated and will no longer be maintained here. Its functionality has been folded into mandoc version 1.12.1 and upward.

Description

mandoc-tools is a set of ISC-licensed tools for searching and retrieving UNIX manuals, primarily those in the mdoc language. These interface with the mandoc tools for parsing, searching, and rendering manuals. mandoc-tools consists of the following systems.

apropos

This utility augments the traditional apropos with full semantic awareness. It is basically a command-line version of mandoc.cgi. It has the following features:

searching by POSIX regular expressions;
output sorting options; and
fine-grained semantic keyword search.

The manual for this utility is available as apropos.

mandoc.cgi

This is a CGI application for web-based querying and rendering of UNIX manuals. mandoc.cgi has the following features:

highly customised output (dynamically-loaded HTML output template);
fine-grained semantic keyword search;
results rendered in a variety of media types;
secure, aggressive validation of input;
searching by POSIX regular expression;
strict standards-compliance (HTTP, HTML, etc.);
HTTP cache compliance (Last-Modified et al.); and
UTF-8 input and output (multi-byte keyword searching).

This project is not yet suitable for generic deployments, as development is still quite inflexible.

Sources

The mandoc-tools sources are in plain-old ANSI C and should build and run on any UNIX system. However, the system has four compile-time dependencies:

libhtml, for DOM parsing;
mandoc, for escape-character rendering; and
Berkeley Database for interfacing with the keyword database (this is pre-installed on most BSD UNIX systems).

Moreover, an installation of mandoc is a run-time dependency for mandoc.cgi. The /usr/local/bin/mandoc path is hard-coded.

Download

Current source

mandoc-tools.tar.gz (md5)

Contact

For all issues related to mandoc-tools, contact Kristaps, kris...@bsd.lv.

News

16-12-2011: version 0.1.5

Project is deprecated: all components merged into mandoc.