Thursday, May 5, 2011

Introducing manpg.es -- an Ubuntu Manpage URL Shortener!


Three years ago today, I kicked off the Ubuntu Manpage Repository project with an RFC to the Ubuntu-Doc mailing list.  Millions of roff-to-html renderings and page views later, I'm really, really proud of the Ubuntu Manpage Repository!  It's such a convenient way to read traditional UNIX manual documentation, which may or may not be present on your local system.

Today, I would like to introduce manpg.es -- a URL shortener for Ubuntu manpages, for use in IRC, mail, wikis, microblogging, etc.  Inspired by Martin Pool's excellent pad.lv shortener for Launchpad, I hope you find this useful too!

Save yourself a few keystrokes, and try http://manpg.es/.  Perhaps you'd like to read about bash: http://manpg.es/bash, or maybe man, itself: http://manpg.es/man, or maybe you're just asking yourself wtf, http://manpg.es/wtf.

Note that the logic to guess which manpage you're looking for won't get it right every time, but it's usually pretty darn close.  Moreover, improvements are always welcome at lp:ubuntu-manpage-repository ;-)

Enjoy,
:-Dustin
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8 comments:

  1. MichaelMay 5, 2011 at 9:59 AM

    Nice. Any way of specifying the section number? open.1, open.2 and open.3 are all very different manpages...

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMay 5, 2011 at 10:11 AM

    How can I refer to a specific section? The example above is affected too: the general man man is about man(1), but http://manpg.es/man links to man(7)...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dustin KirklandMay 5, 2011 at 11:12 AM

    Section numbers are coming very, very soon :-)

    I need the Canonical IS guys to roll out some new logic to manpages.ubuntu.com for that to work. I'll blog again when that's up and running ;-)

    Cheers,
    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dustin KirklandMay 6, 2011 at 3:27 AM

    Darwin Survivor,

    Can you give some examples? FYI, the functionality requires javascript.

    Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dustin KirklandMay 16, 2011 at 3:24 AM

    Michael + Anonymous,

    Section numbers are now supported!

    e.g.:
    * http://manpg.es/open.3posix

    Cheers,
    Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousMay 16, 2011 at 6:28 AM

    @Dustin Kirkland It is now working, thanks. I recently installed no-script, but can't remember if I had it running when I tried it last time.

    As always, great work, keep it up!

    ReplyDelete
  7. MichaelMay 16, 2011 at 7:24 AM

    Fantastic job! Thanks for all the work.

    ReplyDelete
  8. mathewMay 20, 2011 at 2:51 PM

    You have some encoding problems. Look at http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/en/man1/ls.1posix.html, -F option.

    "Do not follow symbolic links named as operands unless the -H or
    -L options are specified. Write a slash ( ��’/��’ ) immediately
    after each pathname that is a directory, an asterisk ( ��’*��’ )
    after each that is executable, a vertical bar ( ��’|��’ ) after each
    that is a FIFO, and an at sign ( ��’@��’ ) after each that is a
    symbolic link. For other file types, other symbols may be
    written."

    ReplyDelete

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin