MANual DOCumentation



Do you have a lot of .DOC files scattered all over your drive?
Have trouble finding the one you need? Are they taking up a lot
more room than you care to devote to them? This little batch
file may be what you have been looking for (and didn't realize
it). You will need LIST and FV which comes with LIST as well as
this file.

Unix has a man command. By entering man and the name of the
command you want information on, a manual is displayed. Simple
and neat. With a little bit of work, MAN.BAT will allow you to
do the same thing with DOS plus keep all of those .DOC files
ZIPped up in one file, saving a good bit of disk space.


Creating the DOCS (TDOCS) ZIP file


First of all, create a work directory and copy all of you .DOC
files to it. Delete all of the extensions, mainly .DOC, and
rename them to the name of the program minus any version numbers
etc. If you have Nortons, sort all of the files in alphabetical
order. Then create TDOCS (or whatever you wish to call the
archive) by running "PKZIP TDOCS *.*". Move TDOCS to the
directory you wish to keep it and kill all the files in your work
directory and remove the directory. In other words, CLEAN UP
YOUR ROOM! 🙂

Next create a directory for the unZIPped man files. No other
files should be kept in this directory. If you do a MAN *.* this
entire directory will be deleted. DOS will ask if you really
want to do this.

Edit MAN.BAT and change the SET command in the second line of
MAN.BAT to the path and filename where you put TDOCS. Change the
third line gor the path to your work directory. Make sure
MAN.BAT, LIST and FV are in directories in your PATH.


Using MAN

You should now be ready to test your MAN command. To view a
"directory" of the MAN commands available to you, enter MAN by
itself. FV should display this directory (in alphabetical order
if you sorted the filenames). Enter MAN and the name of a
program you want information on and have an entry for in TDOCS
and MAN.BAT will unzip the DOC for this program and display it
with LIST. When you exit LIST, the unZIPped file will be
deleted. An error message will be displayed if no man file is
found in TDOCS.

If you have a novice user on your system, you may want to add
your own "man" files to TDOCS for DOS commands as well. There
are files around that explain each DOS command and you could cut
each command out and put them in TDOCS. DOS 5.0 has a HELP
command that makes this unnecessary but earlier versions of DOS
could use this help.

Enjoy and more disk space to you!

\/\/alter