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2023-07-07

manpage fulltext search

man -K <term> got you covered¹:

 -K, --global-apropos
        Search for text in all manual pages.  This is a brute-
        force search, and is likely to take some time; if you can,
        you should specify a section to reduce the number of pages
        that need to be searched.  Search terms may be simple
        strings (the default), or regular expressions if the
        --regex option is used.

        Note that this searches the sources of the manual pages,
        not the rendered text, and so may include false positives
        due to things like comments in source files.  Searching
        the rendered text would be much slower.

some useful additions:

• --regex: search via regular expression
• -P less: use always a pager, otherwise short manpages will get printed without pager making it difficult to search within the page
• --html=firefox: show pages in the browser

some interesting searches via man -P less -K <term>:

• knuth, torvalds, ritchie: take some history lessons
• <swear>: look for your favorite swear
• 1337: reveal the elite
• coffee: shows that one shouldn’t use espdiff “while sleep-walking, or before your first cup of coffee”
• love: who spreads the most love