A script for full text searching Linux man pages with Elasticsearch.

It has been developed to play around with the idea described in this post.

Given that you have a running Elasticsearch instance, the script creates an index named elman and feeds it with the man pages of your Linux system using the apropos . command to get all available pages. Then you can use it to full text search the man pages as simple as:

elman concatenate files

It is a Ruby script so you must have the language installed.

Clone this repository and from withing the script's directory execute:

bundle

to install the elasticsearch gem and its dependencies.

Note

If you don't have bundler on your system, install it with:

gem install bundler

To setup the index and load the man pages use:

./elman -s

or

./elman --setup

The script creates a file under your home directory named .elman.yml. Change its contents to match your setup:

---
:elasticsearch:
  :host: localhost
  :port: '9200'
  :search_results_size: 10

To search the man pages, use:

elman <query>

elman edit images

• Improve search definition

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/iridakos/elman/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

This tool is open source under the MIT License terms.