September 15, 2009

Install git man pages the easy way

There seems to be a few ways to install the git man pages, but these seems to involve some wacky tricks with a copy of the git repo checked out. I wanted to make sure I had the man pages for my exact version of git and just wanted them in place so I could do git help command and see some pretty helps.

First, figure out your version number. Mine was 1.6.4.2

git --version

Then download the tarball for that version and unzip to your manpage dir:

curl -O "http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-manpages-1.7.7.4.tar.gz"
sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/share/man -f git-manpages-1.7.7.4.tar.gz

If you really don’t want to think, cut-n-paste the following:

cd /tmp
curl -O "http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-manpages-`git --version | awk '{print $3}'`.tar.gz"
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man
sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/share/man -f git-manpages-`git --version | awk '{print $3}'`.tar.bz2


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