How Do I Format Man Pages without man or groff?
The man2html program translates groff text to HTML, which you can view with a Web browser. The man2html program, and many like it, are availble on the Web. Look for them with your favorite search engine. The unformatted manual pages are stored in subdirectories of /usr/man, /usr/local/man, and elsewhere. If you want to view text, use nroff and less. Both of these programs have MSDOS versions with an implementation of the man macro package available as well. An example would be: $ nroff -man /usr/man/man1/ls.1 | less If you know where to find a good implementation of the man macros without installing groff, please let the FAQ maintainer know. If the manual page filename ends in .gz, then you’ll need to uncompress it before formatting it, using gzip -d or gunzip.
