Please share that script when you do it. It might be fancy to read man pages when one is bored instead of watching something as the randomness might dig some cool facts of the system for you which you did not know before hand.
Unfortunately there are a couple of commands that don't have a man page, e.g. mpplu (from argyllcms-1.4.0-2.fc17.x86_64) or showchar (from psutils-1.17-38.fc17.x86_64).
I know the OP said he was a VIM guy, but here's my first approximation to a random manual page script for emacs; it doesn't strip out directories (like man1) or specify different sections of the manual, but it indexes manual pages, so you not only won't try opening pages for commands that don't have them, but you'll get other pages too (eg, the TCL library man pages):
;; Taken from http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ElispCookbook#toc57
(defun directory-dirs (dir)
"Find all directories in DIR."
(unless (file-directory-p dir)
(error "Not a directory `%s'" dir))
(let ((dir (directory-file-name dir))
(dirs '())
(files (directory-files dir nil nil t)))
(dolist (file files)
(unless (member file '("." ".."))
(let ((file (concat dir "/" file)))
(when (file-directory-p file)
(setq dirs (append (cons file
(directory-dirs file))
dirs))))))
dirs))
;; Taken from
;; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3815467/stripping-duplicate-elements-in-a-list-of-strings-in-elisp
(defun strip-duplicates (list)
(let ((new-list nil))
(while list
(when (and (car list) (not (member (car list) new-list)))
(setq new-list (cons (car list) new-list)))
(setq list (cdr list)))
(nreverse new-list)))
;; Display a random manual page
(defun open-random-man-page ()
(interactive)
;; Get manual page paths from the environment.
(setq man-paths (parse-colon-path (getenv "MANPATH")))
(setq man-dirs ())
(dolist (man-path man-paths)
(setq man-dirs (append man-dirs (directory-dirs man-path))))
;; Get a list of files in manual page paths.
(setq files ())
(dolist (man-dir man-dirs)
(setq files (append files (directory-files man-dir nil "^[^\.].*"))))
;; Fixup the files to be a list of man pages.
(setq man-pages ())
(dolist (file files)
(setq man-pages (cons (car (split-string file "\\." t)) man-pages)))
(setq man-pages (strip-duplicates man-pages))
(random t)
(man (nth (random (length man-pages)) man-pages)))
Be aware that Emacs lisp is still something I'm learning; I'm sure the above could be improved.
Another thing to consider: on my main Debian Linux box at home, this script finds roughly 20k man pages, which would take more than fifty years to read them all if you are reading one a day. Granted, I have tons of stuff installed, you could read more than one a day, reading a random one will lead to/make you aware of what's available on your system, etc, etc. Perhaps I should write up a blog post about this whole experience . . .
Comments
Please share that script when you do it. It might be fancy to read man pages when one is bored instead of watching something as the randomness might dig some cool facts of the system for you which you did not know before hand.
Just found this little snippet via a quick Google search:
I think I may write my own version as well. Just to gain a bit more experience with shell scripting.Unfortunately there are a couple of commands that don't have a man page, e.g. mpplu (from argyllcms-1.4.0-2.fc17.x86_64) or showchar (from psutils-1.17-38.fc17.x86_64).
I know the OP said he was a VIM guy, but here's my first approximation to a random manual page script for emacs; it doesn't strip out directories (like man1) or specify different sections of the manual, but it indexes manual pages, so you not only won't try opening pages for commands that don't have them, but you'll get other pages too (eg, the TCL library man pages):
Be aware that Emacs lisp is still something I'm learning; I'm sure the above could be improved.Another thing to consider: on my main Debian Linux box at home, this script finds roughly 20k man pages, which would take more than fifty years to read them all if you are reading one a day. Granted, I have tons of stuff installed, you could read more than one a day, reading a random one will lead to/make you aware of what's available on your system, etc, etc. Perhaps I should write up a blog post about this whole experience . . .