[ale] Something I saw a long time ago...

[Michael B. Trausch]

I saw a book that had the complete set of stock Linux manual pages in
it. I haven't the slightest clue as to what the title was or anything,
but I am wondering if anyone knows if there is a (modern) book like that
available today or not. The book that I saw was something like the Unix
System User's Manual from Bell Labs, where it was an entire book full of
the man pages from the system. Anybody know what I am talking about?

Mostly, I was looking to see if it would be reasonable to print my
section 2 and 3 man pages from my system and put them into a binder, but
I cannot afford to do that; the complete output would be somewhere
around (a very loose guess) of 790 pages, not counting for each man page
starting on a new page.

(My guess does not account for the PostScript formatting from the -t
option, which is invariably what would be used, but I am not sure how I
would get an accurate page count that way, using system tools, and there
are hundreds of man pages; at the absolute minimum we would be talking
about 638 pages, assuming one sheet per man page. My guess is just the
total of lines output by 'man $page' divided by 66, as obtained by:

$ (echo "scale=4"; echo -n '(' ; for i in `ls /usr/share/man/man2
/usr/share/man/man3 |grep '.[23].gz$'|grep -v [A-Z]` ; do x=`echo $i |
sed 's/\.[23]\.gz//g;'` ; man $x 2> /dev/null | wc -l | tr -d '\n' ;
echo -n '+' ; done ; echo '0)/66') | bc

... and could probably be filtered down a little more if I knew exactly
what I was filtering out; I only filtered out caps because the add-in
libraries use them and I am not interested in them.)

Any ideas?

-- 
"Fate: Protects fools, children, and ships called /Enterprise/."
                               -- William T. Riker, ST:TNG, "Contagion"


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