PAGEDATE 19980917 -> 19990515 syntax example... see TOPIC e.g. see sedDESCRIPTION
man is the name of the traditional unix help facility. cLIeNUX see is implemented entirely differently than the traditional man command, which is based on ideas related to printed documents. cLIeNUX emphasizes online viewing of documentation, and uses Lynx (browse) for an HTML hypertext interface. cLIeNUX see invokes the Lynx file/web hypertext browser/manager. A see namespace entry-point is just that, a mere entry point. Depending on permissions settings, this interface also makes it convenient to edit your own documentation. All the various MIME types of information are available, potentially, including pictures and motion pictures.
Two great strengths of the manpage tradition are intended to be preserved in this interface. First, there tends to be a manpage for every unix command, usually by the authors of the command or associated parties. Second, the man command is an information namespace, where topics are invocable by name, if they exist. That is, you don't have to know *where* a manpage is, you just have to know it's name (and it's capitalization). Manpages also exist for library calls and so on, but the resultant seedocs may or may not be in cLIeNUX Core.
cLIeNUX see only looks for manpages in /help/see . Manpages may have a filename of the form TOPIC.#.man or TOPIC.#.html . If there is a .man and an .html file for a topic, the .html file will be displayed. The see namespace is flat, so it may as well all be in one directory. An .html "seedoc" may provide links to any other file at all, and may involve GCI scripts or lynxexec tags. The # in a seedoc name like sed.#.man is the traditional section number for the page. cLIeNUX manpages are all in one directory, but the section number field is preserved. There are five 1971 UNIX Programmer's Manual manpages are in section L (for Legacy), e.g. cat.L.man. There are also a few topic.e.html entries for typical shell environment variables.
There is an intro seedoc for each "section" of the seedocs. They are 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Note that many commands have help right in the executable. Most GNU
commands will produce a usage message with
GNUcommand --help
(with the odd exception of gcc), and many commands will produce a usage
message on any commandline switches they can't parse. cLIeNUX Bash has
been modified to give it's help with the builtin "shelp" instead of
"help", so that the command "help" can be a more general browse-based
script.
cLIeNUX see has some snags vis-a-vis hyperlinks. In some cases left-arrow won't return you to the previous document, but hitting q will. Hitting e may invoke edit/Pico, allowing you to leave yourself a note, and possibly contribute to cLIeNUX. All the other browse/Lynx hotkeys are in force, including h for the Lynx help tree. When Lynx calls view/zgv to display an image, all the zgv viewing keys work, and x or esc will escape back to Lynx. On this box zgv leaves the text font messed up when it exits an image. I have not added a fix for that to .zgvrc because I suspect this box is unusual in that regard.
Copyright 1998/1999 Richard Allen Hohensee
Released for redistribution only as part of cLIeNUX Core