Re: Accessibility of man pages

[Dirk Gouders]

Hi Ingo,

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> writes:

> Hi Dirk,
>
> Dirk Gouders wrote on Sat, Apr 08, 2023 at 09:48:13PM +0200:
>
>> Yes, it's very slow but close to `man -K`:
>> 
>> find...             man -K...
>> 
>> real 107.45         real 96.34
>> user 117.06         user 70.11
>> sys 14.43           sys 26.86
>> 
>> [a thought later]
>> 
>> Oh, I found something much faster:
>> 
>> $ time -p find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs bzgrep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE
>> [snip]
>> 
>> real 24.30
>> user 32.34
>> sys 6.84
>> 
>> Hmm, perhaps, someone has an explanation for this?
>
> These are all terribly slow IMHO.
>
> For comparison, this happens on my OpenBSD notebook, with more than
> five hundred optional software packages installed in addition to the
> complete default installation:
>
>    $ time man -k any=RLIMIT_NOFILE
>   dup, dup2, dup3(2) - duplicate an existing file descriptor
>   getrlimit, setrlimit(2) - control maximum system resource consumption
>   sudoers(5) - default sudo security policy plugin
>     0m00.21s real     0m00.00s user     0m00.03s system

Yes, this is really fast and would allow for quite interesting ways to
work with manual pages.

But, OpenBSD's `man -k` operates on a makewhatis(8) database and not on every
single manual page or am I wrong?

Regards,

Dirk