• info2pod and info2man
• Overview
• Download
• Rant

info2pod and info2man

Overview

info2pod converts GNU info data to POD format [http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/pod/perlpod.html] for easy transcription to various formats like HTML. info2man is a wrapper for info2pod to convert info files into nroff -man format.

My personal man command knows to use this on info files to pretend they're part of the normal UNIX man documentation. I just add the info directories to my $MANPATH and go!

Download

The info2man.tar.gz tarball contains the two scripts and the necessary Perl modules.

Rant

Why info2pod?

info's too stupid to read stdin

So incorporating it into other tools sucks.

I want my ordinary ``man'' command to find info files

And now it does, presenting the info files nicely paged with my preferred pager rather than info's baroque viewer.

Many GNU manual pages are insultingly empty

Many GNU people seem to be arrogant scum in that they produce farces of manual entries, each prefaced with ``we like info, so we don't maintain this page, and it's probably a pack of lies - go read the info file''.

Of course, the only way to do that is to fire up emacs or to use their weird info tool, which doesn't act much like a pager at all and violates the ``use my preferred pager'' approach people should be able to expect.