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OS X: Opening man pages in Preview

Admittedly, this is perhaps more of an interesting trick rather then a needed feature; However, if you’ve ever wanted to print man pages or simply read them in a nice, anti-aliased document view instead of within the Terminal, here’s a tip you might like. The following bash script (and credit goes 100% to my friend Victor, who is sans-blog) will format and open man pages in Preview:

#!/bin/bash

cmd=$1
if [ -z $cmd ]; then
    me=`basename $0`;
    echo "Usage: $me command_name";
    exit;
fi

man $1 > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "No man page for $cmd";
    exit;
fi

man -t $cmd|open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app

On my box, I called the script ‘manpreview’ and dropped it in ~/bin/ for easy access. Once you `chmod u+x` it (and have ~/bin/ in your path), you’ll be able to do fun things like `manpreview tcpdump` for some extended reading.