Searching for a specific option in a man page
- by mitch_feaster
I often find myself man'ing a command just to learn about one specific option. Most of the time I can search to the option just fine, unless it's something like ffmpeg or gcc where I have to step through about 40 matches until I get to the actual description of the option...
Sometimes I can get lucky and search for the word "options" to get close and then refine it from there, but it would be nice if I could reliably jump straight to the option in question. It would be cool if there was a tool that could parse out the options and build a database on which you could do searches, but after looking at the groff markup for a few pages I've determined it would only be a best-guess effort due to the lack of meta-information in groff markup... In my ideal world woman mode in emacs would support searching for specific options... :)
Any tips for jumping straight to a specific option in a man page?