man helper

A tiny tool to show man page entries to a given CLI.

In unix bash there are often long commands and it is not directly clear what they are doing. Let's take netstat -tulpen as an example. The program itself is called netstat and -tulpen are some parameters which we want to know what they are actually doing. The usual way is to search in netstat --help or in man netstat. The output of netstat --help looks like this:

[...]
        -l, --listening          display listening server sockets
        -a, --all                display all sockets (default: connected)
        -F, --fib                display Forwarding Information Base (default)
        -C, --cache              display routing cache instead of FIB
[...]

The output of man netstat looks like this:

[...]
   -l, --listening
       Show only listening sockets.  (These are omitted by default.)

   -a, --all
       Show both listening and non-listening sockets.  With the --interfaces
       option, show interfaces that are not up

   -F
       Print routing information from the FIB.  (This is the default.)

   -C
       Print routing information from the route cache.
[...]

We only want to know the meaning of the options -t, -u, -l, -p, -e and -n. So we have to search in the entire documentation for each option. Here this tool steps in: For a given command line, this tool searchs each option in the man page and prints the corresponding paragraph.

$ ./do.py netstat -tulpen
unknown param: -t

unknown param: -u

option: -l, --listening
descr:  Show only listening sockets.  (These are omitted by default.)

option: -p, --program
descr:  Show the PID and name of the program to which each socket belongs.

option: -e, --extend
descr:  Display additional information.  Use this option twice for maximum detail.

option: --numeric, -n
descr:  Show  numerical addresses instead of trying to determine symbolic host,
        port or user names.

The options -t and -u are not in a standard format and don't have a detailed description, so these have to be searched manually if necessary. In the manpage they are (only) listed like this:

       netstat   {--statistics|-s}   [--tcp|-t]   [--udp|-u]   [--udplite|-U]   [--sctp|-S]
       [--raw|-w]

Requirements

Unix with man and Python2.

Usage

./do.py CLI

example:

$ ./do.py netstat -tulpen
unknown param: -t

unknown param: -u

option: -l, --listening
descr:  Show only listening sockets.  (These are omitted by default.)

option: -p, --program
descr:  Show the PID and name of the program to which each socket belongs.

option: -e, --extend
descr:  Display additional information.  Use this option twice for maximum detail.

option: --numeric, -n
descr:  Show  numerical addresses instead of trying to determine symbolic host,
        port or user names.

$ ./do.py curl -i http://github.com
option: -i, --include
descr:  Include  the  HTTP-header in the output. The HTTP-header includes things like
        server-name, date of the document, HTTP-version and more...
        See also -v, --verbose.

TODO

• git plugin