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I found a nice wealth of information on some commands that I use in /usr/share/doc. Some are in a weird format though with tags such as:

  • \verbatim and \endverbatim
  • \section and \endsection

Any idea what format this is? E.g. of one of the files: /usr/share/doc/rpm-*/spec

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Maybe troff? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff – Zoredache Oct 13 '11 at 22:29
Almost all of the documents on my SL6.1 system are plain text. There are a few which seem to be in some sort of Markup language (lAtEx?). There are even a few in HTML, or PDFs! – Stefan Lasiewski Oct 13 '11 at 23:05
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2 Answers

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It's a LaTeX file. The file(1) command is useful for determining a file's type, e.g.:

$ file /usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/*                                                                                                        
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/builddependencies: ASCII English text                                                                           
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/buildroot:         LaTeX document text                                                                          
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/ChangeLog.bz2:     bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k                                                     
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/conditionalbuilds: ASCII English text                                                                           
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/COPYING:           ASCII English text                                                                           
[...]
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/spec:              LaTeX document text                                                   
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/triggers:          LaTeX document text                                                                          
/usr/share/doc/rpm-4.8.1/tsort:             LaTeX document text
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Thanks! Any idea how to best view them? – Beaming Mel-Bin Oct 14 '11 at 12:29
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up vote 1 down vote

It looks like LaTeX format

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