Copy all the text of an entire `man` page from Terminal.app

Question

I am reading a very long man page (man ssh). I want to save all of that text for more convenient reading in a text-editor.

Unfortunately, choosing either of :

• Edit → Select All → Copy

• Shell → Export Text As...

results in saving only a screen-full of the text, not all the text that scrolled by.

How do I extract the text of an entire man page?

Answer 1

You can push plain text to the clipboard by piping to pbcopy, to paste anywhere as usual.

man ssh | col -b | pbcopy

or equivalent

man -P "col -b | pbcopy" ssh

the latter of which is nicer if you want to use it as an alias, like mancp ssh, given:

alias mancp='man -P "col -b | pbcopy"'

There are methods to go to HTML/PDF: Can man pages be converted to html and/or pdf format?

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If it's just the nicer reading experience you're after, you can right-click on a selection of a command and open its man page as a separate window/tab, with normal scrolling and ⌘F find.

You can customise what this looks like in Terminal Preferences → Profiles, under the Man Page profile which is one of the default profiles to exist.
This includes font family and size (also see View menu) and background/foreground colours.

Answer 2

If you want to read the man page in Preview, nicely formatted as a PDF, you can run

man -t ssh | open -f -a Preview

Or

man ssh | col -b | open -f -e

to open the text version in TextEdit.

Answer 3

Pipe the standard output of running man command to builtin col utility. Run the following command line:

man ssh | col -b > ssh.txt

Answer 4

The best reading experience for these tasks is achieved when using a dedicated application for that.

Two candidates:

AquaLess

AquaLess is a text pager for Mac OS X. It allows you to browse plain text files and -- more importantly -- text output from Unix command line tools. AquaLess is a Cocoa replacement for the less command, which is constrained to the terminal window. AquaLess opens a separate window for each text, so you can keep working in the terminal while you read.

Or ManOpen

ManOpen is a MacOS X GUI application for viewing Unix manual pages, which are the standard documentation for Unix command line programs, programmer libraries, and other system information. It can open files directly or be given titles, in which case it will display the output from the `man' command-line program. An apropos interface is also provided, which is basically a quick-and-dirty search of the man page databases. Services are provided to other applications to open selected files/titles or do apropos searches using the selected text. ManOpen can be useful for opening a man page without dropping down to the command line, browsing and searching through long and complex man pages, or simply for printing them out.

Also included is an `openman' command line tool, which is similar to man except it will display the man pages in ManOpen.app instead of directly to the terminal.

Or read those pages in Safari? Then go bwana

Download Bwana and drop it into your applications folder. Then, without even running it, you can start viewing Unix manual pages using your browser. Just type "man:" followed by the man page you're looking for into your browser's URL field. Hit enter and let Bwana do the rest.

The man pages generated by Bwana are simple and to the point. We just threw in some color, some bold headers and cleaned it up a bit, so they go easy on the eye. In fact, Bwana is so simple - there's not much else we can say about it. So just download Bwana now to see how easy it integrates with your browser and what a difference it makes in viewing man pages.

You can then build a shell function for it like this:

function sman
    open -a Bwana man:$1
end

For completeness sake: if you have X11 installed, then you also have xman.

Other candidates might be Man Reader ($), Manpager, Manpower ($), Man Viewer.

Answer 5

If you like you have PDF copies of your manual pages, here is a function I added to my .bash_profile file to create a PDF of each BSD command I'd check the manual page for:

manp () 
{ 
    docDir="$HOME/Documents/BSD Commands"
    [[ ! -d $docDir ]] && mkdir -p "$docDir"
    if [[ ! -f $docDir/$1.pdf ]]; then
        man -t "$1" | pstopdf -i -o "$docDir/$1.pdf"
        open "$docDir/$1.pdf"
    else
        open "$docDir/$1.pdf"
    fi
}

So, in Terminal, typing e.g. manp bash instead of man bash a PDF gets created, if it hasn't already been, and then opened by the app registered to handle PDF documents. The default is Preview, however on my system it's set to use Skim, as its search functionality is better then Preview and as a matter of fact will find the search string when Preview just will not.

Note that the first time the function is used it will enumerate some fonts in the output in Terminal, however this is a one time enumeration of the fonts.

The nice thing about PDF copies is it maintains formatting, i.e. bold font and italics, etc.

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As a side note, typing just the command name in Terminal and then right-click on it and select Open man Page, displays it in a fully scrollable and searchable Terminal window, which is much better then typing e.g. man bash.

Answer 6

Why make things more complicated than they are?

https://man.openbsd.org/ssh

Since you can post here, you obviously have access to the internet.

If you google around a bit you can probably find versions formatted in different ways, e.g., pdf or so.