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

Doug McNash dmcnash at charter.net
Thu Sep 28 19:00:18 EDT 2006


I have a set of those type books sitting in my basement.  They
are the later AT&T/386 published versions from around the time NCR was 
owned by AT&T. Now that you mention it, they need a better home (free to
students) if anyone wants them.  The downside is that they are stored in 
an old SCO box.


On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> 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?
> 
> 



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