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Unfortunately, that command doesn't work on macOS (`/usr/bin/man: illegal option -- l`). I tried to get a one-liner with piping working on my Mac but I always r

Unfortunately, that command doesn't work on macOS (`/usr/bin/man: illegal option -- l`). I tried to get a one-liner with piping working on my Mac but I always ran into errors. The -l flag doesn't exist in the macOS man implementation (I consulted the man page; meta!).

jolmg 3y ago
The `-l` can be skipped (probably because there are `/`s in man's argument): curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ | man /dev/stdin
- BossingAround 3y ago
  (which still doesn't work on mac)
- divbzero 3y ago
  This still doesn’t work for me on macOS, perhaps a difference in how /dev/stdin is implemented? Fortunately, macOS has ZSH as the default shell so the following does work: man =(curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/)
penguinjanitor 3y ago
Maybe 'man <(curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/)' works then?
- BossingAround 3y ago
  Nope
- divbzero 3y ago
  This doesn’t work because it’s equivalent to piping stdout from curl into stdin for man.
  - penguinjanitor 3y ago
    It's not, that would be `man <<< "$(curl ...)" `. `man <(curl ...)` is a slightly different version of the process substitution[1] from your comment - `man =(curl ...)`. [1] https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Process-Substitution https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Proces...
    - divbzero 3y ago
      You’re right, it isn’t quite the same as piping. man <(curl ...) ends up working on Linux but for whatever reason still yields an error on macOS: No manual entry for /dev/fd/11
      - jasomill 3y ago
        curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ | mandoc -a works on macOS (and should also work on (Free|Net|Open)BSD, which ship similar man toolchains).
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    It's actually process substitution: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Process-Substitution.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Process-S... It's essentially running the process in another shell and sending its output to a tempfile. The name of that file is then substituted in the original command. So, in theory, equivalent to `inner > /tmp/file; outer /tmp/file`. This works with programs that don't read from stdin, or need two or more inputs, for example.

jolmg 3y ago

The `-l` can be skipped (probably because there are `/`s in man's argument): curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ | man /dev/stdin

BossingAround 3y ago
(which still doesn't work on mac)
divbzero 3y ago
This still doesn’t work for me on macOS, perhaps a difference in how /dev/stdin is implemented? Fortunately, macOS has ZSH as the default shell so the following does work: man =(curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/)

penguinjanitor 3y ago

Maybe 'man <(curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/)' works then?

BossingAround 3y ago
Nope
divbzero 3y ago
This doesn’t work because it’s equivalent to piping stdout from curl into stdin for man.
- penguinjanitor 3y ago
  It's not, that would be `man <<< "$(curl ...)" `. `man <(curl ...)` is a slightly different version of the process substitution[1] from your comment - `man =(curl ...)`. [1] https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Process-Substitution https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Proces...
  - divbzero 3y ago
    You’re right, it isn’t quite the same as piping. man <(curl ...) ends up working on Linux but for whatever reason still yields an error on macOS: No manual entry for /dev/fd/11
    - jasomill 3y ago
      curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ | mandoc -a works on macOS (and should also work on (Free|Net|Open)BSD, which ship similar man toolchains).
- globular-toast 3y ago
  It's actually process substitution: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Process-Substitution.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Process-S... It's essentially running the process in another shell and sending its output to a tempfile. The name of that file is then substituted in the original command. So, in theory, equivalent to `inner > /tmp/file; outer /tmp/file`. This works with programs that don't read from stdin, or need two or more inputs, for example.