Re: reviewing what is available

Hi Luke,

Luke A. Call wrote on Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 01:36:49PM -0600:
> On 04-01 12:47, Chris Bennett wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 07:01:15AM -0600, Diana Eichert wrote:

>>> have you considered looking at native OpenBSD tools?
>>> https://man.openbsd.org/egre.4

>> Wow! I had no idea about this.

> I think you know more about obsd than I do, but in case it's useful to
> anyone else:
>
> I didn't know about egre(4) either, but I am trying to go
> gradually thru the process of seeing "what is there" by browsing to
> man.openbsd.org, putting a single period (".") in the search field,
> choose a section, click apropos, and methodically reading.

As jmc@ made me aware recently, an equal sign (or even better: Nm=)
is faster than a period because it doesn't need to evaluate a regular
expression for each and every manual page in the database. ;-)


By the way, you can do that from the command line, too, no need
to access the Internet:

$ man -s 2 -ak Nm=

then type

:tNAME

and hit the "enter" key. If you aleady know about the stuff shown
at the top of the screen, just hit the

t

key once, or as many times as the top of the screen seems familiar.
Even if you decide to study something and move around with arrows
up and down and search with the "/" and "?" keys, hitting the "t"
key again later will get you to next manual page from the place
that you last jumped to with "t". If you get very confused as to
where you stopped and whether you maybe skipped anything, hit "T"
(= Shift-t) until you see something familiar, then move forward
again with "t" as before.

The "man -s 2 -ak Nm=" feature has been working for a long time, for
multiple -stable releases, but for the ":tNAME" and "t" sugar, you
nead a *really* current -current, as in, from a few minutes ago,
or tomorrow's (amd64) snapshots, or later for slower architectures.

Enjoy,
Ingo


> Lots of good
> stuff and some surprises (for me at least) in there. If I hadn't
> done that once with debian (years ago), I wouldn't know about touch(1),
> for example, and a bunch of other things.
>
> Again, you know more than I, so no insult intended. :)