Function: woman

woman is an autoloaded, interactive and byte-compiled function defined in woman.el.gz.

Signature

(woman &optional TOPIC RE-CACHE)

Documentation

Browse UN*X man page for TOPIC (Without using external Man program).

The major browsing mode used is essentially the standard Man mode. Choose the filename for the man page using completion, based on the topic selected from the directories specified in woman-manpath and woman-path. The directory expansions and topics are cached for speed. With a prefix argument, force the caches to be updated (e.g. to re-interpret the current directory).

Used non-interactively, arguments are optional: if given then TOPIC should be a topic string and non-nil RE-CACHE forces re-caching.

Note that M-x woman doesn’t yet support the latest features of modern man pages, so we recommend using M-x man if that is available on your system.

Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 21.1.

Key Bindings

Source Code

;; Defined in /usr/src/emacs/lisp/woman.el.gz
;;;###autoload
(defun woman (&optional topic re-cache)
  "Browse UN*X man page for TOPIC (Without using external Man program).
The major browsing mode used is essentially the standard Man mode.
Choose the filename for the man page using completion, based on the
topic selected from the directories specified in `woman-manpath' and
`woman-path'.  The directory expansions and topics are cached for
speed.  With a prefix argument, force the caches to be
updated (e.g. to re-interpret the current directory).

Used non-interactively, arguments are optional: if given then TOPIC
should be a topic string and non-nil RE-CACHE forces re-caching.

Note that `M-x woman' doesn’t yet support the latest features of
modern man pages, so we recommend using `M-x man' if that is
available on your system."
  (interactive (list nil current-prefix-arg))
  ;; The following test is for non-interactive calls via emacsclient, etc.
  (if (or (not (stringp topic)) (string-match-p "\\S " topic))
      (let ((file-name (woman-file-name topic re-cache)))
	(if file-name
	    (woman-find-file file-name)
	  (message
	   "WoMan Error: No matching manual files found in search path")
	  (ding)))
    (message "WoMan Error: No topic specified in non-interactive call")
    (ding)))