Showing a man page in C++

Question

I created a man page for my C++ application and I would like to show it to the user when a particular flag is specified in the command line. Is system("man myapplication") the only way to do this, or are there any better options?

Answer 1

I'd probably take the nroff (text) output of man and stick it either in the code as one huge string or in a separate file depending on how many pieces the program installs with.

Calling system("man") requires a lot of dependencies which is the last thing your unfortunate user wants to deal with after typing my_program --long-help. It would work just fine in many cases, but when it didn't you'd lose an important feature of your program and have to report the rather silly "sorry: no long help available".

This would also increase portability to systems that never had a man program.