How do I get a plain text man page without all that ^H^_ stuff?

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# 10. How do I get a plain text man page without all that ^H^_ stuff?

Have a look at `col`(1), because `col` can filter out backspace sequences. Just in case you can't wait that long:

`funnyprompt$ groff -t -e -mandoc -Tascii manpage.1 | col -bx > manpage.txt`

The `-t` and `-e` switches tell `groff` to preprocess using `tbl` and `eqn`. This is overkill for man pages that don't require preprocessing but it does no harm apart from a few CPU cycles wasted. On the other hand, not using `-t` when it is actually required does harm: the table is terribly formatted. You can even find out (well, "guess" is a better word) what command is needed to format a certain `groff` document (not just man pages) by issuing

    funnyprompt$ grog /usr/man/man7/signal.7
    groff -t -man /usr/man/man7/signal.7

"Grog" stands for "GROff Guess", and it does what it says--guess. If it were perfect we wouldn't need options any more. I've seen it guess incorrectly on macro packages and on preprocessors. Here is a little perl script I wrote that can delete the page headers and footers, thereby saving you a few pages (and mother nature a tree) when printing long and elaborate man pages. Save it in a file named `strip-headers` & chmod 755.

        #!/usr/bin/perl -wn
        #  make it slurp the whole file at once:
        undef $/;
        #  delete first header:
        s/^\n*.*\n+//;
        #  delete last footer:
        s/\n+.*\n+$/\n/g;
        #  delete page breaks:
        s/\n\n+[^ \t].*\n\n+(\S+).*\1\n\n+/\n/g;
        #  collapse two or more blank lines into a single one:
        s/\n{3,}/\n\n/g;
        #  see what's left...
        print;

You have to use it as the first filter after the `man` command as it relies on the number of newlines being output by `groff`. For example:

`funnyprompt$ man bash | strip-headers | col -bx > bash.txt`

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