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.

Stoneware

I agree that it's annoying that they're no longer online, because it makes it impossible to link to them. However, they're still installed on your development machine with the developer tools and accessible using the man command. – Epencephalon

@KenThomases: I'm looking for the manual pages without being wired to a Terminal — Thanks. Imagine how many answers/questions on here now have broken links referencing man pages that no longer exist. – Ronnyronsard

I suggest filing this as a bug with Apple. The more people do this, the more likely it is they'll revert the change. Complaining about it on Stack Overflow on the other hand is unlikely to improve the situation. (although it might lead some more users to file radars.) – Helicoid

Answer 1

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.

Apt