Re: Accessibility of man pages

Dirk Gouders
2023-04-08T20:59:54Z

Hi Ingo,

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> writes:

> Hi Dirk,
>
> Dirk Gouders wrote on Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 09:48:13PM +0200:
>
>> Yes, it's very slow but close to `man -K`:
>>
>> find... man -K...
>>
>> real 107.45 real 96.34
>> user 117.06 user 70.11
>> sys 14.43 sys 26.86
>>
>> [a thought later]
>>
>> Oh, I found something much faster:
>>
>> $ time -p find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs bzgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE
>> [snip]
>>
>> real 24.30
>> user 32.34
>> sys 6.84
>>
>> Hmm, perhaps, someone has an explanation for this?
>
> These are all terribly slow IMHO.
>
> For comparison, this happens on my OpenBSD notebook, with more than
> five hundred optional software packages installed in addition to the
> complete default installation:
>
> $ time man -k any=RLIMIT_NOFILE
> dup, dup2, dup3(2) - duplicate an existing file descriptor
> getrlimit, setrlimit(2) - control maximum system resource consumption
> sudoers(5) - default sudo security policy plugin
> 0m00.21s real 0m00.00s user 0m00.03s system

Yes, this is really fast and would allow for quite interesting ways to
work with manual pages.

But, OpenBSD's `man -k` operates on a makewhatis(8) database and not on every
single manual page or am I wrong?

Regards,

Dirk