man_sections

A wrapper around man to show in which sections the command is available.

What it does

You type man somecooltool as usual. Now, if somecooltool has an entry in multiple man sections, instead of opening the first one only, this tool tells you like so:

$ man tty
Manual entry for tty found in sections 1, and 4.

To then open one of those sections, you explicitly specify the section, as always:

$ man 4 tty

If your command is found only once, its man page is opened directly, but you get informed where it has been found (visible only after you closed the man viewer, obviously).

$ man rm
# [Man viewer open now]
Manual entry for rm found in section 1 only.

Installation

Copy the man script file somewhere into your $PATH before the real man command. That's it.

Optionally, you might also want to adapt the ORIGINAL_MAN='/usr/bin/man' variable to reflect the path to your original man.

It doesnt work!!!

• Make sure this script really sits somewhere in your $PATH, and that this location is also found before your the location of your real man. You might want to verify this with which man.
• Commands which only occur in one section (like man ls) open the man viewer directly, as usual.

Caveats / ToDo

• This tool calls the original man command 9 times on each invocation. Checking the relevant locations directly might be more efficient
• It makes use of non-sh arrays, so the shebang is set to zsh right now. There might be a more universal solution.
• Some tab-autocompletion of possible/found sections might be handy, but i have no idea how to do this