Writing man pages

Command line tools should be shipped with man pages.

Note

To make fullest use of all features, man pages should be written in their native markup language, mdoc.

However, this has a quite steep learning curve, so the following can be used to get started quickly.

One way to create man pages from Markdown is by using pandoc and the template from https://github.com/pragmaticlinuxblog/pandocmanpage.

To convert Markdown to man:

$ pandoc Desktop/launch.1.md -s -t man -o  Desktop/launch.1
$ /usr/bin/man ~/Desktop/launch.1

To convert man to txt:

$ /usr/bin/man ~/Desktop/launch.1 | col -b > ~/Desktop/launch.txt

Order of sections

For more information, see man mdoc.

• PROGNAME section

• NAME

• LIBRARY

• SYNOPSIS

• DESCRIPTION

• CONTEXT

• IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

• RETURN VALUES

• ENVIRONMENT

• FILES

• EXIT STATUS

• EXAMPLES

• DIAGNOSTICS

• ERRORS

• SEE ALSO

• STANDARDS

• HISTORY

• AUTHORS

• CAVEATS

• BUGS

• SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS