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I am confused about a three Documentation techniques used, I have The following questions concerning man , pinfo , /usr/share/doc

  • Does the man command Display the same content like pinfo and just the difference in the way they display information ? or they are totally different in content and the source directory it gets the documentation from ?

  • Does any of man or pinfo look in pinfo look in /usr/share/doc or it's just a third way for searching for information for installed packages

AbdAllah Talaat
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1 Answers1

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  • man displays man pages. It doesn't attempt to display Info docs.

  • pinfo displays documentation in GNU Texinfo format if it is available. If Info-format documenation doesn't exist, it will try to display a man page - e.g. if you run pinfo bash and the Info docs for bash aren't available (perhaps because you haven't installed the bash-doc package) then it will run man bash for you.

    pinfo's man page says:

    When the search for info pages fails, man is called with the infopage argument, and its output is parsed by pinfo. This means that when you don't have the appropriate info page, but have a man page instead; the man page will be viewed.

    pinfo also has a -m or --manual option you can use to tell it to display the man page rather than the info page by default. Note that everything after the -m, including other options, is passed to man, and will not be used by pinfo itself..

  • Neither pinfo nor man will look under /usr/share/doc.

cas
  • 78,579
  • that sums up that each of the three ways have it's own content at it's own directory . except for pinfo if didn't find the topic at it's own directory it will run man topic ? – AbdAllah Talaat Mar 15 '18 at 13:22
  • yes, as I said, pinfo will try to display the man page if the .info file is missing. My answer explicitly states what man and pinfo will and will not do. – cas Mar 15 '18 at 13:28
  • thanks also for the edit .. it illustrated the mechanism further – AbdAllah Talaat Mar 15 '18 at 13:44