info and man

[Peter]

On Sat, 20 May 2006, Paul King wrote:

> What is the word on man? Is that being phased out? Do we now have  to
> store two formats of the same documentation? I noticed that doing an
> "info ls" gives me the manpage inside of info. Are they similar formats?

Fwiw info is plain text with (rare) markup of the form:

^\* MenuSelection\. Description$

and

^-*- Something -*-$

You can read the info files with less. They are in /usr/local/info 
usually. There is a dir file that is an index to everything. There are 
some special control characters used in the files. Ignore them.

You must realise that info is a hypertext format that predates the www. 
It is much more terse than the www and although the reader could have 
friendlier commands it is not so bad imho. You can always use a web 
interface to read info files.

Peter


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