May 7, 2008
Easily convert man pages to text documents
| Have you ever wanted to convert a man page into a plain text document? We can do this, when we want to share information via an email or other document format. 1) Here's the wrong way to write the man page for the ls command into a text file named ls.bad: man ls > ls.bad This keeps all of the formatting characters in your document, which is generally not what you want. 2) Here's a better way that eliminates those formatting characters: man ls col -b > man.txt The col command with the -b option removes the undesirable backspace characters from the text stream, so the only thing left in your document is the text you want, in the format you want. |
the correct syntax should be 'man ls|col -b >ls.txt'
you forgot the pipe between man command and col -b