Package maintenance at the command line
debman
You can use debman
(Figure 5) to quickly locate and display the man page associated with a particular package. The package is followed by the version, or, if you do not want a specific version, by a repetition of the package name. Any local environment variable like $MANPATH
is ignored. Instead, the specified package is extracted to a temporary directory and used to retrieve its man pages. With the -p
option, the named package will be downloaded from the repositories; the -f
option downloads the local .deb
file.
debmany
Using debmany
(Figure 6), you can create a list of man pages associated with a package and then select and display them one at a time. You can choose to display a page in a viewer of your choice that can read files with a .gz
extension using the -k
option in KDE's Plasma, the -g
option in Gnome, or the -x
option in Xfce, Gnome, or Plasma. Another viewer can also be set with -m VIEWER
. Similarly, although English is the default language, another language can be set using -l
followed by a standard two-letter abbreviation such as fr
for French or de
for German. With any of these options, you can also use -L LENGTH
to set a length limit specified in K
(kilobytes), M
(megabytes), G
(gigabytes), or T
(terabytes). Although, practically speaking, being text, man pages are short enough that the last three set no practical limit.

check-enhancements
The check-enhancements
script (Figure 7) lists any packages that add functionality to a package but are not required to run it. This relationship is indicated by the fact that, if the --verbose
option is used, results begin with "Could be enhanced by." The other options are --installed-packages
(-installed-packages
, -ip
, --ip
), which displays the enhancements for installed packages, and --installed-enhancements
(-installed-enhancements
, -ie
, --ie
), which displays results by enhancements. If no package or enhancement is entered, then the results for every package or enhancement are listed, a process that can take some time and may well be pointless, because the majority of packages on a typical system do not have enhancements. If an enhancement is available but uninstalled, a possible installation candidate is given.
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