SCO Unix/System V Printing FAQ
How do I print man pages from the SCO Unix command line?
The problem is that "man" formats the text with Ctrl-H backspaces and multiple letters to make bold text. Your printer probably will make a mess of it.
One way to strip all that out is to use "col -b":
man ls | col -b | lp
The "-t" option to "man" produces Postscript output, so if your printer (or printer driver) can handle that, you are all set. Linux cups can do that:
Linux:
man -t ls | lpr
Another way on Mac is to use Preview and print from there (which gives you access to gui print options):
Mac OS X Version:
man -t ls | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/
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Thu Feb 14 10:18:23 2008: 3642 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: 3643 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: 6784 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: 6785 TonyLawrence
Again, yes,but not for the crappy old systems this post referenced.
Sun Sep 6 02:20:27 2009: 6861 bofors
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: 6862 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: 6912 anonymous
man -t expect | lpr
did exactly what the man said it would.
thank you it's what i needed.
ubuntu 9.04
Sat Dec 25 07:01:45 2010: 9180 Josh
I've been looking for a command like this for quite some time now, and I use it often enough that I went ahead and made a little shell script that I find useful because remembering all of those flags is a pain in the butt. I named it "manprint" but you can name it whatever you like. Just as a side-note, errors are passed through automatically, at least on my system.
if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Error in $0 - Invalid Argument Count"
exit
fi
echo "Expect this to take a while; that is normal... Go get some coffe while y$
man -t $1 | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/
exit
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