Darwin/Reference Manual Pages Missing

Question

Apple has either removed all manual pages or I simply can't find them at their new location (specifically macOS) — it's as if they've just conveniently wiped them from existence.

↳ Mac OS X Manual Pages - Apple Developer

// The page you’re looking for can’t be found.

Where have they gone? In Terminal it's possible via man, although I'm looking for online.

Answer 1

The sources of BSD-derived macos utilities are now on opensource.apple.com — BUT the default web renderer does not render them in a human-readable way, it only does syntax highlighting for the grep.1 file (or the tex version of grep manpage), for example: e.g.

• https://opensource.apple.com/source/grep/grep-28/grep/doc/grep.1.auto.html

If you have groff available (e.g. brew install groff) then you can get readable output with:

curl -s https://opensource.apple.com/source/grep/grep-28/grep/doc/grep.1 | groff -mandoc -Tutf8

which will probably match the output of running man grep on a macos box.

Or download the file locally (wget https://opensource.apple.com/source/grep/grep-28/grep/doc/grep.1) and then use:

man ./grep.1

Or, as an alternative, the archived versions can be used thanks to arhive.org:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20160528175804/https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/grep.1.html

Answer 2

A set of manual pages for iOS seems to be live still: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/System/Conceptual/ManPages_iPhoneOS/

A third-party site also hosts MacOS 10.14 Mojave manpages: https://www.unix.com/man-page-mojave-repository.php

Also, the nroff markup (basically the source code of manual pages) is still available in public Git repositories that mirror the source code of Darwin.

Here are some of them: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/tree/master/bsd/man

GitHub doesn't render a preview of manual pages like it does for Markdown, AsciiDoc and some other markup formats. But those files can be easily rendered with a command like nroff -man dup.2 or with the newer mandoc (available from Homebrew as brew install mandoc). These resources could hopefully be combined to make a public web site with some reasonably recent set of manual pages.