man pages

[ramchandar]

hi

what should i do to use man page for a newly installed library....
when i searched in my system i saw the library file with extension .gz in a ( man/man3...sorry dont remember but sure it was in some man page related directory ) directory ....

now i want to see the funtion syntax with

PCQlinux# man <functionname>

help me...

[RobSeace]

Huh? I'm not sure I get what you're asking...

What man pages are installed under what names will vary depending
on what you're installing... If you can see the name of the installed
man page, then that's the name you want to pass to "man" to look
it up... Eg: if the file was "libexpect.3.gz", then you'd call
"man 3 libexpect" (or just "man libexpect") to see the man page...

[ramchandar]

hi rob... :)

you are really gr8 ..though my question is confusing one, u answered me what i expected

actually i saw the libxml2 library installed already ..
i want to see syntax for api's or functions in that library..
i found a file libxml2.2.gz in man/man2 directory....
as u said i used man 2 libxml2 it worked for me...

and now i am installing a new library ..say libsoup (for SOAP API)...
i found no file like libsoup.*.gz
so what should i do to see the syntax for api's in libsoup...
should i download libsoup.*.gz or the help file will be there in some other form..?

while installing a new library whether the specific rpm will have the man pages or we have to download it separately..?

this is what i tried to ask u actually...

(sorry for my language....i hope u feel comfortable with question this time )

[RobSeace]

Ah, I get it... You seem to be laboring under the delusion that there's
some kind of packaging standard which everyone in Unix-land
follows... ;-) I'm afraid not... Every package is different, and what it
contains is purely at the whims of the packager... Some may package
man pages in with the main package; some may have a separate
"devel" or "docs" package that contains them; some may have no
man pages written at all... Some people are moving away from man
pages, towards crappy "info" pages... (Those people should all be
beaten, BTW... ;-)) Others are moving to HTML docs... (Far less
horrid than "info", at least... But, nothing beats the ease of use of
good old "man"...) And, of course, some apps/libs simply won't have
ANY kind of docs written up yet, at all, and you're expected to read
through the source and headers to figure out how to use them... I
have no idea WTF "libsoup" is, so I couldn't help you with the specifics
in this case... But, if you don't see any other separate packages on
the web site for it, then just look through all of the files in the package,
and see if any look like they might be documentation, of some sort...
(You mentioned RPM, so if it's a "*.rpm" package, then you can do
"rpm -qlp *.rpm" to list every file that gets installed by the RPM... For
an already installed package, you can just do "rpm -ql <name>"...)

[ramchandar]

You seem to be laboring under the delusion that there's
some kind of packaging standard which everyone in Unix-land
follows... ;-) I'm afraid not

yes rob as u said i assumed that there is a some kind of standard ..but now u have cleared the thing ...thanx rob :D

mmm...i will look for the docs :( for libsoup