NAME
manlifter - mass-conversion script and test harness for doclifter
SYNOPSIS
manlifter [-d option] [-e] [-f listfile] [-h] [-I mandir] [-o outdir]
[-p patch-directory] [-q] [-v] [-s section] name...
manlifter [-S]
DESCRIPTION
manlifter is a script that sequences doclifter(1) to convert an entire
manual-page tree to XML-Docbook, optionally also generating HTML from
the XML. Another use is as a torture-test tool for doclifter; it logs
errors to standard output and collects timings.
Called without any file arguments, manlifter tries to convert all man
pages installed on the system, placing the resulting xml files under
xmlman in the current directory. Each successfully translated page
foo.N is copied to manN/foo.xml beneath the output directory,
regardless of what source directory it came from.
For each source file examined, if the destination file exists and is
newer than the source, the conversion is skipped; thus, incremental
runs of manlifter do the least work needed to keep the target XML tree
up to date. Likewise, in -h mode derived HTML files are only made when
necessary.
Stub pages that are just .so redirections are translated to
corresponding symlinks of XML files (and, with -h, HTML files).
manlifter may also be called with a single file argument, which is
interpreted as the stem name of a potential manual page. manlifter
then searches all selected manual sections for a matching page and
attempts to convert it. In this case, a copy of the man page and the
converted version are dropped immediately beheath the output directory,
with the names foobar.man and foobar.man.xml, respectively. This mode
is normally only of interest only to doclifter developers for debugging
that program.
In either of the above cases, manlifter will uncompress the file if it
has a .gz, .bz2 or .Z suffix on the name.
Options are as follows:
-d
Pass the string argument to each doclifter call as options. Each
space-separated token in the string becomes a separate argument in
the call.
-e
Run in log-filter mode (mainly of interest to doclifter
developers). In this mode, manlifter reads a test log from standard
input and filters it in a a way dependent on the -f and -q options.
If neither of these is given, messages from successful runs are
stripped out and only errors passed through to standard output.
-f
Normally, run doclifter on the files named by each line in the
argument file. In error-filter mode the argument is instead
interpreted as a filtering regular expression.
-h
Also generate HTML translations into the output directory. DocBook
citerefentry markup is transformed to hyperlinks in the directory,
and a contents listing is generated to index.html.
-I
Specify the root of the manual-page tree. By default this is
/usr/share/man.
-o
Set the output directory into which XML-DocBook translations will
be dropped. By default this is xmlman under the current directory
in batch mode, or the current directory otherwise.
-p
Interpret the argument as the name of a patch directory (the
default name is prepatch under the current directory). Each file
named foo.N.patch is interpreted as a patch to be applied to the
manual page foo(N) before doclifter translates it.
-q
Normally, pass the -q (quiet) option to each doclifter call. In
error-filter mode, return a list of files on which translation
failed.
-v
Pass the -v (verbose) option to each doclifter call. This option
can be repeated to increase the verbosity level.
-s
Specify a section to scan. Use this with an argument; it should not
be necessary when doing a conversion of the entire tree.
-S
Compile error statistics from a manlifter logfile presented on
standard input. This option will be of interest mainly to doclifter
developers.
manlifter emits a logfile to standard output. The file begins with a
timestamp line and a blank line, and ends with a line giving run time
and various interesting statistics. Between these are stanzas,
separated by blank lines, one for each file on which doclifter was run.
The first line of each stanza beguns with "! ", followed by the
pathname of the source manual pager, followed by "=" and the return
status of doclifter run on that file. Following that is a space and
doclifter´s runtime in seconds.
This initial line may be followed by information messages and the error
output of the doclifter run.
manlifter must find a copy of doclifter in either the current directory
or one of the command directories in your PATH in order to run.
BUGS
HTML generation is painfully slow. Unfortunately, there is little we
can do to remedy this, because XSLT engines are painfully slow.
SEE ALSO
doclifter(1), xmlto(1)
AUTHOR
Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
There is a project web page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/.
05/27/2008