Fallback to regular man if page not exists about tldr

[ChrisCummins]

I know this thread is long dead, but incase anyone stumbles on this while Googling a solution, I use a help function defined in my .bashrc to set man as a fallback:

help() {
    tldr "$@" 2>/dev/null || { echo "No tldr entry for $1 (try tldr --update)"; man "$@" }
}

If you dont like that man is fullpage, use a different pager than the default (less). E.g. to print only the first 50 lines of the manpage:

help() {
    tldr "$@" 2>/dev/null || { echo "No tldr entry for $1 (try tldr --update)"; MANPAGER="head -n50" man "$@" }
}

[nelsonpecora]

Maybe a short message saying "Sorry, no tldr page yet. Create one at [url]!" then a 2 second pause before loading the man page?

[rprieto]

I'm not sure about the auto-opening, especially since man pages go full-screen.
Maybe a prompt like this?

No TLDR page for "ssh" yet.
Please consider contributing to the project.

- Press [o] to browse to http://github.com/rprieto/tldr
- Press [m] to open the man page instead
- Press any other key to exit

Although that's a change from the usual tldr behaviour which is to print something and exit.

[nelsonpecora]

Ooh, I really like @rprieto's idea. Would [o] just do something like open http://github.com/rprieto/tldr? (I know that opens the default browser on OSX, but not sure about other *nix).

[rprieto]

That's what I had in mind, let's find the other *nix equivalents!

[nelsonpecora]

Hmm. Looks like there really aren't any other *nix equivalents, but you could check if chrome / firefox is installed and call them.

[waldyrious]

Some pointers here, but indeed it seems there's no universal solution.

[rprieto]

I don't have a Linux machine handy to try it, but ghwd uses:

# mac and linux-compatible open
open=open
command -v xdg-open && open=xdg-open
$open $url

[waldyrious]

That's what is pointed out in the SO post I linked to. A comment there says it doesn't work on RHEL, but I suppose apart from that its support base is probably wide enough for a start. Besides, if someone can eventually contribute something better, there are always issues and pull requests :)

[rprieto]

Sorry, I was on the train and hadn't read your link yet 😬
You're right this should be a good start!

[rprieto]

Just moving this issue over to tldr-node-client #9.
Each client can probably do it their own say, but I'll start work over there :)

[waldyrious]

Nice trick, thanks for sharing @ChrisCummins! By the way, do you think you could have any input in #527? We got a little blocked trying to come up with some generic shell scripting to implement that idea.