manweb: A CGI script to display |  |
manweb: A CGI script to display | |
The standard location for man pages is in subdirectories
of “/usr/share/man”.
These subdirectories' names must start with “man”. A cursory survey
of man page directories in various installs found
directories named
man0p,
man1,
man1p,
man1x,
man2,
man2x,
man3,
man3p,
man3x,
man4,
man4x,
man5,
man5x,
man6,
man6x,
man7,
man7x,
man8,
man8x,
man9,
man9x,
manl,
and
mann.
The only directory structure that matters is the one on the
web server where this script is installed. At this writing
(December 2007), the aging infohost server
has only man1 through man9,
plus mann, with no suffixes. However, this
script will be more liberal, in anticipation of future
installs that may be more like client machines.
The language of man pages is groff; for details, see the project page
at gnu.org.
The actual files are compressed with gzip, so their names end with .gz.
Here are some examples of actual path names:
/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/Magick++-config.1.gz /usr/share/man/man0p/math.h.0p.gz /usr/share/man/man3/tan.3.gz /usr/share/man/man3/Thread::Queue.3pm.gz /usr/share/man/man3/trace.3x.gz /usr/share/man/man3/ui.3ssl.gz /usr/share/man/man3/vars.3pm.gz /usr/share/man/man1p/nohup.1p.gz /usr/share/man/man6x/bouncingcow.6x.gz
In order to allow access only to legitimate man pages,
this script will limit access to pathnames of this
general form:
/usr/share/man/manS/P.SX.gz
S
The section identifier. This must be a single
digit from 0 to 9 inclusive, optionally followed
by either “p” or “x”.
P
Valid page names must start with a letter or underbar
(_). All additional characters must
be letters, digits, underbars, or any of the
characters {-, +, ., :}.
X
An optional suffix that appears in the file name
right before the final “.gz”. This suffix, if any, may contain only
letters.