From: naddy@mips.ruessel.sub.org (Christian Weisgerber) Subject: Re: man tar Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1993 14:09:40 +0200
In <21negk$nij@news.u.washington.edu>, Tsung-lung Li writes:
> I tried to read the doc of tar by issuing "man tar". Instead of the
> nice format usually seen on a unix system, I got the followings. Is there
> any way to fix it?
>
> \input texinfo @c -*-texinfo-*-
[...]
That's the TeXinfo source file of GNU tar's documentation. It certainly
shouldn't be installed as a man page.
Background:
For some reason the GNU people chose to develop their own documentation
format for the GNU project: TeXinfo. For printed docs TeXinfo source
files can be formatted into TeX source and then processed and printed
with the TeX typesetting package. For on-screen viewing they are
formatted into hypertext-like .info files that can be read with
info-mode in Emacs or a stand-alone info program.
I suggest you get the GNU texinfo-3.1 package from your nearest GNU
mirror. It contains both the makeinfo program for transforming .texi ->
.info files and the stand-lone info viewer. If I remember correctly, it
compiles straight out of the box.
Fix:
Move /usr/man/cat1/tar.1 (or whatever that tar "man page" is called") to
~/tar.texi, run it through makeinfo and install tar.info in /usr/info or
/usr/local/info, depending on your preference. You can view it with
info -f tar.info.
--
Christian 'naddy' Weisgerber, Germany naddy@ruessel.sub.org
"HOWEVER, the guy who designed the PC interrupt structure was an idiot."
--Chris Lewis in <4507@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca>