Writing man pages

Command line tools should be shipped with man pages.

Note

To make fullest use of all features, man pages should be written in their native markup language, mdoc.

However, this has a quite steep learning curve, so the following can be used to get started quickly.

One way to create man pages from Markdown is by using pandoc and the template from https://github.com/pragmaticlinuxblog/pandocmanpage.

To convert Markdown to man:

$ pandoc Desktop/launch.1.md -s -t man -o  Desktop/launch.1
$ /usr/bin/man ~/Desktop/launch.1

To convert man to txt:

$ /usr/bin/man ~/Desktop/launch.1 | col -b > ~/Desktop/launch.txt

Order of sections

For more information, see man mdoc.