Utilities for embedded manpages.
I've never liked the fact that programs and their manpages used separate files — it adds an additional file to worry about when installing software, and another thing to edit when bumping a program's version.
So, I wrote some scripts for embedding manpages in custom ELF sections, plus extracting
those sections for viewing in man
. It might also work with non-ELF binaries, although I haven't
tried those.
You shouldn't use this, it's just an experiment. But, if you'd like to play with it:
# embed a manpage into a binary.
# compression is ignored; any and all contents are inserted into the .manpage section.
$ eman-embed /bin/bash /usr/share/man/man1/bash.1.gz ~/mybash
# view the .manpage section
$ eman ~/mybash
# gracefully fall back to normal `man`
$ eman bash
# section numbers also work
$ eman 2 read