manweb: A CGI script to display man pages

Abstract

Describes a Web script to display Unix man pages online.

This publication is available in Web form and also as a PDF document. Please forward any comments to tcc-doc@nmt.edu.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. The path names of man pages

3. Operation of the script

4. Internals

4.1. Installation
4.2. Prologue
4.3. Imports
4.4. Manifest constants
4.5. Main program
4.6. processArguments(): Retrieve and check the CGI arguments
4.7. findManFile(): Locate the input file
4.8. convert: Convert to HTML and output
4.9. errorPage
4.10. Epilogue

5. Error statistics

5.1. Run-time type errors

1. Introduction

The purpose of this script is to display a selected Unix man page in HTML. It uses the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) protocol to generate and display the web page.

Some consideration is given to security. Arguments passed to the script may contain only certain characters.