This is help2man.info, produced by makeinfo version 6.0 from help2man.texi. This file documents the GNU ‘help2man’ command which produces simple manual pages from the ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ output of other commands. Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation. INFO-DIR-SECTION Software development START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY * help2man: (help2man). Automatic manual page generation. END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY  File: help2man.info, Node: Top, Next: Overview, Up: (dir) ‘help2man’ ********** ‘help2man’ produces simple manual pages from the ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ output of other commands. * Menu: * Overview:: Overview of ‘help2man’. * Invoking help2man:: How to run ‘help2man’. * --help recommendations:: Recommended formatting for –help output. * Including text:: Including additional text in the output. * Makefile usage:: Using ‘help2man’ with ‘make’. * Localised man pages:: Producing native language manual pages. * Example:: Example ‘help2man’ output. * Reports:: Reporting bugs or suggestions. * Availability:: Obtaining ‘help2man’.  File: help2man.info, Node: Overview, Next: Invoking help2man, Prev: Top, Up: Top 1 Overview of ‘help2man’ ************************ ‘help2man’ is a tool for automatically generating simple manual pages from program output. Although manual pages are optional for GNU programs other projects, such as Debian require them (*note (standards)Man Pages::) This program is intended to provide an easy way for software authors to include a manual page in their distribution without having to maintain that document. Given a program which produces reasonably standard ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ outputs, ‘help2man’ can re-arrange that output into something which resembles a manual page.  File: help2man.info, Node: Invoking help2man, Next: --help recommendations, Prev: Overview, Up: Top 2 How to Run ‘help2man’ *********************** The format for running the ‘help2man’ program is: help2man [OPTION]… EXECUTABLE ‘help2man’ supports the following options: ‘-n STRING’ ‘--name=STRING’ Use STRING as the description for the ‘NAME’ paragraph of the manual page. By default (for want of anything better) this paragraph contains ‘manual page for PROGRAM VERSION’. This option overrides an include file ‘[name]’ section (*note Including text::). ‘-s SECTION’ ‘--section SECTION’ Use SECTION as the section for the man page. The default section is 1. ‘-m MANUAL’ ‘--manual=MANUAL’ Set the name of the manual section to SECTION, used as a centred heading for the manual page. By default ‘User Commands’ is used for pages in section 1, ‘Games’ for section 6 and ‘System Administration Utilities’ for sections 8 and 1M. ‘-S SOURCE’ ‘--source=SOURCE’ The program source is used as a page footer, and often contains the name of the organisation or a suite of which the program is part. By default the value is the package name and version. ‘-L LOCALE’ ‘--locale=LOCALE’ Select output locale (default ‘C’). Both the program and ‘help2man’ must support the given LOCALE (*note Localised man pages::). ‘-i FILE’ ‘--include=FILE’ Include material from FILE (*note Including text::). ‘-I FILE’ ‘--opt-include=FILE’ A variant of ‘--include’ for use in Makefile pattern rules which does not require FILE to exist. ‘-o FILE’ ‘--output=FILE’ Send output to FILE rather than ‘stdout’. ‘-p TEXT’ ‘--info-page=TEXT’ Name of Texinfo manual. ‘-N’ ‘--no-info’ Suppress inclusion of a ‘SEE ALSO’ paragraph directing the reader to the Texinfo documentation. ‘-l’ ‘--libtool’ Drop ‘lt-’ prefix from instances of the program name in the synopsis (‘libtool’ creates wrapper scripts in the build directory which invoke ‘foo’ as ‘.libs/lt-foo’). ‘--help’ ‘--version’ Show help or version information. By default ‘help2man’ passes the standard ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ options to the executable although alternatives may be specified using: ‘-h OPTION’ ‘--help-option=OPTION’ Help option string. ‘-v OPTION’ ‘--version-option=OPTION’ Version option string. ‘--version-string=STRING’ Version string. ‘--no-discard-stderr’ Include stderr when parsing option output.  File: help2man.info, Node: --help recommendations, Next: Including text, Prev: Invoking help2man, Up: Top 3 ‘--help’ Recommendations ************************** Here are some recommendations for what to include in your ‘--help’ output. Including these gives ‘help2man’ the best chance at generating a respectable man page, as well as benefitting users directly. See *note (standards)Command-Line Interfaces:: and *note (standards)Man Pages::, for the official GNU standards relating to ‘--help’ and man pages. • A synopsis of how to invoke the program. If different usages of the program have different invocations, then list them all. For example (edited for brevity): Usage: cp [OPTION]... SOURCE DEST or: cp [OPTION]... SOURCE... DIRECTORY … Use ‘argv[0]’ for the program name in these synopses, just as it is, with no directory stripping. This is in contrast to the canonical (constant) name of the program which is used in ‘--version’. • A very brief explanation of what the program does, including default and/or typical behaviour. For example, here is ‘cp’’s: Copy SOURCE to DEST, or multiple SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY. • A list of options, indented to column 2. If the program supports one-character options, put those first, then the equivalent long option (if any). If the option takes an argument, include that too, giving it a meaningful name. Align the descriptions in a convenient column, if desired. Note that to be correctly recognised by ‘help2man’ the description must be separated from the options by at least two spaces and descriptions continued on subsequent lines must start at the same column. Here again is an (edited) excerpt from ‘cp’, showing a short option with an equivalent long option, a long option only, and a short option only: -a, --archive same as -dpR --backup[=CONTROL] make a backup of each ... -b like --backup but ... For programs that take many options, it may be desirable to split the option list into sections such as ‘Global’, ‘Output control’, or whatever makes sense in the particular case. It is usually best to alphabetise (by short option name first, then long) within each section, or the entire list if there are no sections. • Any useful additional information about program behaviour, such as influential environment variables, further explanation of options, etc. For example, ‘cp’ discusses ‘VERSION_CONTROL’ and sparse files. • A few examples of typical usage, at your discretion. One good example is usually worth a thousand words of description, so this is highly recommended. • In closing, a line stating how to email bug reports. Typically, MAILING-ADDRESS will be ‘bug-PROGRAM@gnu.org’; please use this form for GNU programs whenever possible. It’s also good to mention the home page of the program, other mailing lists, etc. The ‘argp’ and ‘popt’ programming interfaces let you specify option descriptions for ‘--help’ in the same structure as the rest of the option definition; you may wish to consider using these routines for option parsing instead of ‘getopt’. By default ‘help2man’ has some heuristics for identifying manual page sections: a line consisting of ‘Options:’ for example will cause the following text to appear in the ‘OPTIONS’ section, and a line beginning with ‘Copyright’ will appear in the ‘COPYRIGHT’ section. Outside of these heuristics, a line consisting of ‘*Words*’ will start a new section, and ‘Words:’ a new sub-section.  File: help2man.info, Node: Including text, Next: Makefile usage, Prev: --help recommendations, Up: Top 4 Including Additional Text in the Output ***************************************** Additional static text may be included in the generated manual page by using the ‘--include’ and ‘--opt-include’ options (*note Invoking help2man::). While these files can be named anything, for consistency we suggest to use the extension ‘.h2m’ for ‘help2man’ include files. The format for files included with these option is simple: [section] text /pattern/ text Blocks of verbatim *roff text are inserted into the output either at the start of the given ‘[section]’ (case insensitive), or after a paragraph matching ‘/pattern/’. Patterns use the Perl regular expression syntax and may be followed by the ‘i’, ‘s’ or ‘m’ modifiers (*note perlre(1): (*manpages*)perlre.) Lines before the first section or pattern which begin with ‘-’ are processed as options. Anything else is silently ignored and may be used for comments, RCS keywords and the like. The section output order (for those included) is: NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION OPTIONS _other_ ENVIRONMENT FILES EXAMPLES AUTHOR REPORTING BUGS COPYRIGHT SEE ALSO Any ‘[name]’ or ‘[synopsis]’ sections appearing in the include file will replace what would have automatically been produced (although you can still override the former with ‘--name’ if required). Other sections are prepended to the automatically produced output for the standard sections given above, or included at _other_ (above) in the order they were encountered in the include file. Placement of the text within the section may be explicitly requested by using the syntax ‘[section]’ to place the additional text before, in place of, or after the default output respectively.  File: help2man.info, Node: Makefile usage, Next: Localised man pages, Prev: Including text, Up: Top 5 Using ‘help2man’ With ‘make’ ****************************** A suggested use of ‘help2man’ in Makefiles is to have the manual page depend not on the binary, but on the source file(s) in which the ‘--help’ and ‘--version’ output are defined. This usage allows a manual page to be generated by the maintainer and included in the distribution without requiring the end-user to have ‘help2man’ installed. An example rule for the program ‘prog’ could be: prog.1: $(srcdir)/main.c -$(HELP2MAN) --output=$@ --name='an example program' ./prog The value of ‘HELP2MAN’ may be set in ‘configure.in’ using either of: AM_MISSING_PROG(HELP2MAN, help2man) for ‘automake’, or something like: AC_PATH_PROG(HELP2MAN, help2man, false // No help2man //) for ‘autoconf’ alone.  File: help2man.info, Node: Localised man pages, Next: Example, Prev: Makefile usage, Up: Top 6 Producing Native Language Manual Pages **************************************** Manual pages may be produced for any locale supported by both the program and ‘help2man’ with the ‘--locale’ (‘-L’) option. help2man -L fr_FR@euro -o cp.fr.1 cp See for the languages currently supported by ‘help2man’, and *note Reports:: for how to submit other translations. 6.1 Changing the Location of Message Catalogs ============================================= When creating localised manual pages from a program’s build directory it is probable that the translations installed in the standard location will not be (if installed at all) correct for the version of the program being built. A preloadable library is provided with ‘help2man’ which will intercept ‘bindtextdomain’ calls configuring the location of message catalogs for the domain given by ‘$TEXTDOMAIN’ and override the location to the path given by ‘$LOCALEDIR’. So for example: mkdir -p tmp/fr/LC_MESSAGES cp po/fr.gmo tmp/fr/LC_MESSAGES/PROG.mo LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/help2man/bindtextdomain.so" \ LOCALEDIR=tmp \ TEXTDOMAIN=PROG \ help2man -L fr_FR@euro -i PROG.fr.h2m -o PROG.fr.1 PROG rm -rf tmp will cause PROG to load the message catalog from ‘tmp’ rather than ‘/usr/share/locale’. Notes: • The generalisation of ‘fr_FR@euro’ to ‘fr’ in the example above is done by ‘gettext’, if a more specific match were available it would also have been re-mapped. • This preload has only been tested against ‘eglibc’ 2.11.2 and ‘gettext’ 0.18.1.1 on a GNU/Linux system; let me know if it does (or doesn’t) work for you (*note Reports::).  File: help2man.info, Node: Example, Next: Reports, Prev: Localised man pages, Up: Top 7 Example ‘help2man’ Output *************************** Given a hypothetical program ‘foo’ which produces the following output: $ foo --version GNU foo 1.1 Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Written by A. Programmer. $ foo --help GNU `foo' does nothing interesting except serve as an example for `help2man'. Usage: foo [OPTION]... Options: -a, --option an option -b, --another-option[=VALUE] another option --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit Examples: foo do nothing foo --option the same thing, giving `--option' Report bugs to . ‘help2man’ will produce ‘nroff’ input for a manual page which will be formatted something like this: FOO(1) User Commands FOO(1) NAME foo - manual page for foo 1.1 SYNOPSIS foo [OPTION]... DESCRIPTION GNU `foo' does nothing interesting except serve as an example for `help2man'. OPTIONS -a, --option an option -b, --another-option[=VALUE] another option --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit EXAMPLES foo do nothing foo --option the same thing, giving `--option' AUTHOR Written by A. Programmer. REPORTING BUGS Report bugs to . COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. SEE ALSO The full documentation for foo is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and foo programs are properly installed at your site, the command info foo should give you access to the complete manual. foo 1.1 May 2011 FOO(1)  File: help2man.info, Node: Reports, Next: Availability, Prev: Example, Up: Top 8 Reporting Bugs or Suggestions ******************************* If you find problems or have suggestions about this program or manual, please report them to . Note to translators: Translations are handled though the Translation Project (http://translationproject.org/) see for details.  File: help2man.info, Node: Availability, Prev: Reports, Up: Top 9 Obtaining ‘help2man’ ********************** The latest version of this distribution is available online from GNU mirrors: If automatic redirection fails, the list of mirrors is at: Or if need be you can use the main GNU ftp server:  Tag Table: Node: Top1165 Node: Overview1972 Node: Invoking help2man2689 Node: --help recommendations5448 Node: Including text9324 Node: Makefile usage11326 Node: Localised man pages12287 Node: Example14191 Node: Reports16811 Node: Availability17265  End Tag Table  Local Variables: coding: utf-8 End: