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When I'm grepping a man page for the section titles written in capitals, it seems as if they are not there. It works with the same words in lowercase. For example, when I write man <xxx> | grep -i also, it shows all the lines with the word "also" but not "SEE ALSO" section title.

How can I make grep recognize section titles of man pages?

Jeff Schaller
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user361195
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    Can you give an example of this failing? I can't reproduce what you describe. What do you get for `man ls | grep -A2 ALSO`? What operating system are you using? – terdon Jul 07 '19 at 12:22
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    I'm using OpenBSD and I get nothing. Anyway, I've solved it - between first and second command add another pipe - | col -b or | ul - so it becomes: man | col -b | grep -A2 "SEE ALSO" – user361195 Jul 07 '19 at 12:37
  • This seems to be https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/271550/how-can-i-search-for-bolded-or-underlined-text; the man page appears to me to come out as `S^HSE^HEE^HE A^HAL^HLS^HSO^HO` – Jeff Schaller Jul 08 '19 at 00:09

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I don't have a BSD system to check on, but there are probably more whitespace characters than you expect between the SEE and the ALSO. Try one of these instead:

man foo | grep -A2 'SEE.*ALSO'
man foo | grep -A2 'SEE\s*ALSO`

or even, since it's unlikely there will be any other occurrences of capitalized ALSO, just:

man foo | grep -A2 ALSO
terdon
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  • Hey, thanks for your reply. It didn't work for "ALSO", neither for "FILES" section of the man page - but it could find all those words in lowercase. Anyway, I solved it already by myself and posted a solution above. – user361195 Jul 07 '19 at 14:42
  • @user361195 if you really want to use that approach (which is more complex than necessary, the best solution would be to check what non printing characters you have there, run `grep SEE | od -c` or something), please post it as an answer and not a comment. That way, you can accept it and get some rep (if you care about that) but more importantly, the question can be marked as answered. – terdon Jul 07 '19 at 14:45