help2man 1.36.4 review

help2man is a tool for automatically generating simple manual pages from program output

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 83K Developer: Brendan O'Dea

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help2man is a tool for automatically generating simple manual pages from program output. It is intended to provide an easy way for software authors to include a manual page in their distribution without having to maintain that document.

Given a program which produces resonably standard --help and --version outputs, help2man will attempt to re-arrange that output into something which resembles a manual page.

Invoking help2man

The format for running the help2man program is:

help2man [option]... executable

help2man supports the following options:

-n string

--name=string
Use string as the description for the NAME paragraph of the manual page.
By default (for want of anything better) this paragraph contains manual page for program version.

This option overrides an include file [name] section (see Including text).

-s section

--section section

Use section as the section for the man page. The default section is 1.

-m manual

--manual=manual

Set the name of the manual section to section, used as a centred heading for the manual page. By default User Commands is used for pages in section 1, Games for section 6 and @samp{System Administration Utilities} for sections 8 and 1M.

-S source

--source=source

The program source is used as a page footer, and often contains the name of the organisation or a suite of which the program is part. By default the value is the package name and version.

-i file

--include=file

Include material from file (see Including text).

-I file

--opt-include=file

A variant of --include for use in Makefile pattern rules which does not require file to exist.

-o file

--output=file

Send output to file rather than stdout.

-N

--no-info

Suppress inclusion of a SEE ALSO paragraph directing the reader to the Texinfo documentation.

--help

--version

Show help or version information.

By default help2man passes the standard --help and --version options to the executable although alternatives may be specified using:

-h option

--help-option=option

help option string

-v option

--version-option=option

version option string