The Missin Man Pages Project - How to write a man page

If you wish to write a man-page to add to m2p2, you want to take a look at THE LINUX MAN-PAGE-HOWTO.

In addition, you want to give man(7) a careful read. A man-page for m2p2 should ideally have the following sections:

1. NAME
2. SYNOPSIS
3. DESCRIPTION
4. USAGE
5. OPTIONS
6. REQUIRES
7. FILES
8. VERSION
9. BUGS
10. SEE ALSO
11. AUTHOR

If the application uses configuration-files, there should also be a man-page for the format of this configuration file. This page would then belong into section 5 of the man-pages.

Note that AUTHOR is supposed to be the author of the software, not the author of the man-page; if you want to get credit for writing the man-page, you could add another section or list yourself in the AUTHOR section with an explanatory comment.

Marc Vertes <mvertes@cimai.com> sent me the URL of a shell-script he wrote, which converts an ASCII text file into man-page format, so if you are unfamiliar with man and the various roff's, take a look at http://mvertes.free.fr/txt2man.

If you like, you can use the template provided by m2p2 to write the man-page. If you want to submit the man-page, please gzip it first, so that it will be of the format name.section.gz.

If you do not feel like writing roff sources and are more of a SGML person, you can use this SGML template, which can be converted into roff sources by passing it through makeman.pl (part of the MakeMan project).