Printing FAQ

How do I print man pages from the command line?

 man ls | col -b | lp
 

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Thu Feb 14 10:18:23 2008: Subject: Far better is...   anonymous


man -t <command> | lpr

e.g.: man -t ls | lpr

This will give you a very nice fully formatted, comfortably readable print-out of you man page, including title and page-numbers.

2 cent.



Thu Feb 14 10:40:38 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


On a modern Linux or BSD system, yes.. but not on the old SCO boxes this was written for..



Tue Aug 25 15:17:17 2009: Subject: man to PDF   anonymous


Example to produce a pdf file for grep:
man -t `man -w grep` | ps2pdf - grep.pdf
Bye. SB




Tue Aug 25 17:21:32 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Again, yes,but not for the crappy old systems this post referenced.



Sun Sep 6 02:20:27 2009: Subject: OS X solution   bofors
http://www.infowars.com

The solutions proposed above did not work so great for OS X or at least choked my printer.

Here is what did:

man -t "_cmd_" | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/

Where you replace _cmd_ with the name of the command you want to print the man page for. For example, diskutil:

man -t "diskutil" | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/

That generates a nice PDF to print out.

Cheers,
~bofors



Sun Sep 6 10:00:36 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Right.

Having this old stuff here can be confusing - that's why I have the warning ahead of the article.

It is nice to have more modern answers in the comments.



Tue Sep 15 21:38:32 2009: Subject:   anonymous


man -t expect | lpr

did exactly what the man said it would.
thank you it's what i needed.
ubuntu 9.04

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