This was an attempt to write an auditor tool for *NIX like systems.
I like man pages... well, in theory, most of the time they suck.
But having one is generally better than not having one... esp those
commands in /bin or SUID files or whatever.
I wrote this a billion years ago, plus or minus, which is why it's in Perl, which had seen better days back then (that and the fact that /usr/openwin/bin was in the path should hint to the age...)
I generally think there's a correlation: the more a system is used the less documented they are, so it's fairest to run this right after an install if doing compares. Code bloated by wiring in a few libraries for standalone running.
Usage: i-heart-man.pl -h -v -m -s
-h print help and exit
-v verbose (for testing)
-m don't use the /etc/man*{cf,conf,config} file for more info
-s explicitly print out SUID/SGID files that are undocumented
This finds what which system commands have man pages (as well as calculating a few percentages. Looks through some system dirs - currently /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, & /usr/sbin, as well as some window command dirs - /usr/openwin/bin & /usr/X11R6/bin - for potential binary files (currently just looks for an executable bit). It then looks through the $MANPATH var (if it exists) as well as through /usr/man, /usr/local/man, /usr/share/man, /usr/X11R6/man, & /usr/openwin/man for man pages that might correspond.
Bugs - something well (overly? ;-)) documented like perl might not have a man page; on my redhat system, for instance, there is a binary called "perl5", but the man page is perl.1 (as well as a zillion others in sub man pages). Also doesn't check for info pages; I can't find a man page (ahem) to see how it works (well, it appears to have one now... but who uses it, anyway?)
Note that the more a system is used the less documented it will be, and the -m flag might reflect this unfairly, as many net commands are installed without man pages.
Most systems seem to be in the 80-90% range... but I see SUID files and all sorts of things undocumnted all the time. Having "only" 100 undocumented commands in /bin, /usr/bin, and the like... doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies.
But that's me.
It breaks the results out into three main areas - system (/bin, /usr/bin, etc.), window commands (not as popular as they once were, but...), and SUID & SUID commands.
From my heavily modified mac running 10.13.4 -
$ i-heart-man.pl
Total System Commands Undocumented % documented
1786 521 70.8
Total Window Commands Undocumented % documented
124 113 8.9
Total Priv'd Commands Undocumented % documented
16 100.0
A stock AWS ubuntu 16.04LTS system w/o X-Windows -
Total System Commands Undocumented % documented
1108 101 90.9
(no Windowing specific commands found)
Total Priv'd Commands Undocumented % documented
18 1 94.4
Etcetera.