Online Manual Pages
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For concise summaries of features and options, nothing beats UNIX manual
pages.
This book doesn't cover every option and every feature (not even every
command!) of MH.
Some parts of the book -- like the Chapter on
MH Formatting -- expect you to use the
manual pages for reference.
Unfortunately, not all systems make manual pages available.
To see whether your system has online manual pages for MH, try using the
man(1)
command to read the
mh(1)
manual page:
% man mh
If that doesn't work, try to find the manual page for the man command
itself:
type man man.
Look for instructions on how to make man search directories other
than the standard /usr/man tree.
For instance, on my system, man looks at the directories listed in
the MANPATH environment variable.
Because my MH manual pages are in /usr/local/mh/man instead of the
standard places, I've added a new definition of MANPATH to my shell's
startup file:
setenv MANPATH /usr/man:/usr/local/mh/man csh, tcsh: .login
MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/local/mh/man sh, ksh, bash: .profile
export MANPATH
If you make that change, re-read the startup file into your shell
(type source .login or . .profile) and try the
man command again.
Still can't find the manual pages?
Ask your system administrator to install them from the MH source tree.
If that isn't possible, you can get MH 6.8.3 documentation from the host
ftp.ics.uci.edu in the directory /pub/mh/doc.
(If you can't use the link above, see the Appendix
Obtaining Example Files From This Book for directions.)
The files MH.doc.Z and MH.ps.Z are compressed text and
PostScript, respectively.
The MH.doc file has lines that are more than 80 characters wide;
it doesn't display well on most terminals until you remove most of the
leading blanks from the lines.
So, if you choose the MH.doc.Z version, try commands like the ones
below to uncompress it into an MH.doc file:
% zcat MH.doc.Z | colrm 1 12 > MH.doc
% uncompress < MH.doc.Z | cut -c13- > MH.doc
You can split the MH.doc file into separate manual page files.
Or you can use a pager program like
more(1)
to search MH.doc for the manual page you want.
For example, a more command like /FOLDER(1) will find
the page for the
folder(1)
command.
Finally, if you have a version of MH before 6.8.3, there are old editions
of MH on
ftp.ics.uci.edu in the directory /pub/mh/tar.
Extract the tar file and look in the doc subdirectory;
the files there will be rough -- but still much better than nothing.
Now you're ready to take one (or more!) of the tours:
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