16
votes

How do I write a man page?

Where can I find a reference of all formatting codes?

Are there any good tutorials on writing man pages?

What is the most convenient way to write a man page? Should I enter it directly in a text editor? Are there WYSIWYG editors? Or should I write it in a different format and then convert?

What rules should a good man page follow?

2
  • This question appears to be too broad. It has only succeeded in attracting a bunch of link-only answers and a few unsupported opinions. Oct 15, 2014 at 8:57
  • man man, man groff.
    – Jenny D
    Oct 15, 2014 at 9:19

5 Answers 5

13
votes

Here are a few web pages that will help get you started:

A couple of useful tools:

6
votes

There are tools for writing man pages that bypass troff formatting. manpages are a small, well delimited language and easy to target.

Two popular tools are:

yodl and zoem seem to be other nice formats in this space.

All in all I'd recommend xmltoman because it's a very manpage specific dsl that will guide you closely.

3
  • "dsl" == "domain specific language"? Feb 4, 2010 at 16:23
  • yes (da. si. 15 chars.)
    – Tobu
    Feb 4, 2010 at 16:46
  • 1
    Another good option is ronn, which reads the more-widely-used Markdown text markup language.
    – poolie
    Aug 10, 2013 at 6:07
5
votes

I have written a rather extensive blog article about the topic, which you can find here:

http://2buntu.com/articles/1034/how-to-write-a-manpage/

3
  • 4
    It'd be helpful if you could at least summarize the article here -- links alone are worthless once the linked page inevitably moves or disappears.
    – Caleb
    Jun 26, 2013 at 16:09
  • I do not agree with Caleb. This is the web. The web is based on links, and stackexchange does not carry any special exception to this. Copying content is counterproductive. Whatever bad thing can happen to that page or document can also happen to this one. We cannot hoard scraped copies of all content just because the rest of the web might disappear. (Leave that job to sites like the wayback machine).
    – Kaz
    Oct 9, 2013 at 21:23
  • Kaz, you may not agree, but Caleb's comment is definitely ServerFault best-practice.
    – MadHatter
    Oct 15, 2014 at 8:03
2
votes

I do not know of any IDEs or tutorials, but you can start by copying an existing man page and modify it to suit your needs.

For a reference of the groff language with MAN macros (which is what is used by a man page) consult the groff_man man page, or read it online here

2
votes

Take a look at the ronn project. Its a markdown to man page generator. It can also generate the man pages in html, like this.

I like the idea of writing all my software documentation in one format. Markdown IMO is a good choice

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