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I'd like to read unix manpages on my kindle. I know I can just redirect the man output to a file and give it a .txt extension. But is there a convenient way to convert them en masse to a format with proper cross-references?

Edit: An apology for my behavior in this question. I told pat that I would accept the comment if submitted as an answer, and then better answers came and I did not keep my promise (Sorry). I enthusiastically accepted Caleb's answer that produces html versions of the manpages; and then some time later when I actually tried transferring the files to the kindle, I discovered that the kindle would not display html files; and I switched acceptance without explanation (Sorry). The kindle appears to require .txt or .pdf (or one of the various real eBook formats). I hope I have explained myself.

Also, I didn't have a realistic understanding of how many, many manpages there are with a Debian Linux distribution, and so Caleb's comment about selecting a "Best Of" collection appears to be the best idea. But I don't really have the inclination to try to do this myself (which is a prerequisite for asking questions on StackExchange sites), so I'm not comfortable asking how to select the "Best Of", even though it really is necessary practically in order to do this.

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2 Answers 2

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To dump all the sections of all the man pages on your system to html you could try something like this from a blank directory:

IFS=\. find /usr/share/man/man* -type f -exec basename {} .gz \; | while read page section; do man -Thtml $section $page > $page.$section.html done
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  • Gee, it sure takes a while, don't it? :) Commented Dec 30, 2011 at 7:51
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    @luserdroog: Yes indeed it does. You're the one that asked to convert every unix man page on your system en masse! If what you really want is a "best of" collection to browse in your spare time, a different approach is probably in order. Commented Jan 2, 2012 at 13:45
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To convert every man page to pdf I did man -k . > temp. I created a temp file and a script named file.sh:

#! /bin/bash if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then to_pdf=$(which ps2pdf) if [ -z "$to_pdf" ] ; then to_pdf=$(which pstopdf) fi name="$1" case "$to_pdf" in *pstopdf) man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" -i -o "$fname.pdf" ;; *ps2pdf) man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" - "$name.pdf" ;; *) man -t "$name" > "$fname.ps" esac exit $? fi echo "Wrong number of parameters" exit 1

I wrote a python file pythonfile.py 

import os f=open("temp","r") for i in f: c="bash file.sh "+str(i) os.system(c)`

Then I did 

python pythonfile.py

This will create a pdf for every man page separately inside your working directory.

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