While working with different versions of Mac OS X and macOS, it’s often been useful to me to be able to export the contents of a particular command line utility’s Unix man page to a plain text file. Man pages are the built-in documentation method available in Unix-based systems, so Apple documents how to use the various command line tools used by the operating system using this documentation method.
Exporting to a plain text file allows me to compare macOS Sierra’s man page for a particular command line utilty to a exported copy of the same utility’s man page from OS X El Capitan and see where changes to the man page have been made. This comparison is made by using diff, or other file comparison tools like Kaleidoscope, which helps me quickly spot where Apple has made changes to their documentation.
To export man pages to a plain text file, I use the col command line utility to read the contents of the man page in using stdin, then export out to a plain text file using stdout As an example, here’s how to use col to export the diskutil man page to a new plain text file named diskutil.txt:
man diskutil | col -bx > /path/to/diskutil.txt
In this case, col‘s -b and -x functions are used to make sure that the formatting for the diskutil man page remains intact when exported to the plain text file.
