MANLINT(1)

NAME
manlint - program to report errors in man or mdoc pages

SYNOPSIS
manlint [ options ] [ list of files ]

DESCRIPTION
manlint is a program that identifies lint (errors) in man or mdoc page formatting, similar to a spelling checker for ordinary text. Manlint has a list of permitted macros and escape sequences, and reports the use of any macro or escape sequence not in the permitted list. This permitted list includes all the macros defined in man(7), mdoc(7), and the safe subset of troff defined in man(7). manlint also checks for conformance to various rules.

If a man page passes manlint, it should be widely portable, even to tools such as man2html(1) which don't implement all of troff.

If a list of files is omitted, the standard input is used. A file by the name "-" is interpreted as the standard input.

BUGS
Currently the program is very incomplete. It doesn't have any options, it doesn't actually check escape sequences, and it can't handle mdoc format. Still, it's clear what it should do, and even in its current form it can find lots of problems in existing man files.

AUTHOR
David A. Wheeler (dwheeler@ida.org)

SEE ALSO
man(7), mdoc(7).