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N0rbert
Asked: 2018-07-25 01:42:43 +0800 CST

How to run full text search on help pages offline (from Yelp / gnome-help or something other)?

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I have both Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installed.

I want to search for documentation and read it off-line (as it is included to the installed packages in /usr/share/help and other locations). As far I can understand it has three formats:

  • HTML - .page (dpkg -S .page | grep -E /usr/share/help | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l returns 12 results)
  • DocBook - .docbook (dpkg -S .docbook | grep -E /usr/share/help | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l returns 21 results)
  • ManPage (many from manpath = /usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man)

These files are rendered by Yelp program (from yelp package) with executables yelp and gnome-help.

Notes:

  1. here on AskUbuntu was similar question about ScrollKeeper database (provided by rarian-compat package) without answer;

  2. there is a bug 726439 named "Search for document returns an Unknown error: 'URI xref:search=' could not be parsed" on LauchPad.net (from 2011 year) about broken(?) search in Yelp. If I press CtrlS to search searchterm in current version of Yelp it still returns

    Unknown Error
    The URI ‘xref:search=searchterm’ could not be parsed.

Of course I can run the grep over all these files, but is it possible to run such search from Yelp?

documentation search helpfile offline yelp

2 Answers

  1. This is especially for man pages in Linux.

    find -name "cp.1.gz"| xargs zcat
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  2. Try:

    yelp man:<command>

    For example:

    yelp man:cp
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