# Where to get plain-text Handbook



## beatgammit (Oct 14, 2013)

I'm on 9.2-RELEASE, and I used to have the plain-text handbook at /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/handbook/book.txt. I set up pkgng to track PC-BSD's repositories (until FreeBSD gets its repositories back online), ran pkg2ng and installed portmaster. When I ran `pkg update && pkg upgrade`, it updated to the latest docs, but without the plain-text version.

I think during the initial install I marked some option to install the plain-text docs, so I'm guessing this isn't default, hence why PC-BSD's reposotories updated me to something without it.

How can I get this back? I looked in the ports tree, but I didn't find anything.

BTW, I'm pretty new to FreeBSD, so please pardon any incorrect terminology. This is running on a server, and I'm reading the handbook over SSH, so the HTML docs are pretty useless.


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## ShelLuser (Oct 14, 2013)

First of all there shouldn't be any problem with reading HTML documents on a console; that's why you got console browsers such as www/lynx and www/links.

As to grabbing a copy of the handbook: all it takes is simply reading the first page of said handbook:



> The latest version of this document is always available from the FreeBSD web site (previous versions of this handbook can be obtained from http://docs.FreeBSD.org/doc/). It may also be downloaded in a variety of formats and compression options from the FreeBSD FTP server or one of the numerous mirror sites.


As such my suggestion would be to go to the FreeBSD FTP server, or one of its mirrors, and download it from there.


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## wblock@ (Oct 14, 2013)

The plain text version is on the FTP site.  But I suggest using a browser on the  system you are using for SSH, and either reading the online HTML version or downloading it to that machine.  The HTML version has a lot of markup that makes it easier to read, and the documents don't have to be on the server itself.

Links:
English HTML Handbook
Main FTP documents directory
English documents FTP directory


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## beatgammit (Oct 14, 2013)

Ok, I guess I'll go the Lynx route. Thanks!

I just prefer the plain-text version because it's easy to stop and resume, but I'm more interested in having it automatically kept up-to-date than a specific format.


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