Convert all Linux man pages to text / html or markdown

Yes... To convert one of them, say, man of man:

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz  | groff -mandoc -Thtml

If you want 'all of installed on your PC', you just iterate through them. For different output (text, for example), use different 'device' (the -T argument).

Just in case... if the 'iteration' was the real problem, you can use:

OUT_DIR=...for i in `find -name '*.gz'`; do     dname=`dirname $i`    mkdir -p $OUT_DIR/$dname    zcat $i | groff -mandoc -Thtml > $OUT_DIR/$i.htmldone

Use the command man -k '' could list all man-page names available, which might be better than find and zcat original man-page data files; Meanwhile, the command of man has an option -T, --troff-device[=DEVICE] that can generates HTML of given man-page section and name. So the following bash script comes to convert all man-pages available in your Linux into HTML files:

man -k '' | while read sLine; do    declare sName=$(echo $sLine | cut -d' ' -f1)    declare sSection=$(echo $sLine | cut -d')' -f1|cut -d'(' -f2)    echo "converting ${sName}(${sSection}) to ${sName}.${sSection}.html ..."    man -Thtml ${sSection} ${sName} > ${sName}.${sSection}.htmldone

In a intranet without Internet access that online man-pages service is unavailable, put this files in your static HTTP server such as Nginx with autoindex on is a good option, where browse and Ctrl+F may convenient.

man -Hfirefox ls

opens the manpage of "ls" directly in firefox