[lug] man pages RH 7.2

[Gary Hodges]

rm at fabula.de wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:00:52AM -0600, Gary Hodges wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for your persistence in this thread.  I've just spent a half hour playing
> > around with your suggestions.  Yes, the file man.config can be seeing by a regular
> > user.  After running with the strace option several times, the best I can tell is the
> > MANPATH fields are not being read from the man.config file.  I can rearrange the
> > search order MANSECT and those changes are reflected in the created man.log file, but
> > changes to MANPATH don't seem to make any difference.  I'm not seeing any references
> > to this in google searches -- don't know if that means anything though.  It's a bit
> > long, but I'm including the results of "strace -oman.log man man" at the end of this
> > post.
>
> First a warning: i'm a Debian user, so some things might be different on
> your RH installation. AFAIK man.config is used by 'mandb(8)' and not by
> 'man(1)', which means that man.config (or manpath.config as it's called on
> Debian) is only read when you run 'mandb' to rebuild your man-page index.
> Do you have a 'manpath' bnary on the system? Try running it like
>  manpath -d -- that should give you a pretty good overwiew about where man(1)
> is looking for manpages ('manpath -h' will show you all options).
> As a side note: you can give 'strace' an optional 'expression' paramameter
> that will filter which system call are traced, son in your case running
> 'strace -e open -o trace.log man man' will reduce the output to the relevant
> information.

Hi Ralf,

The results of "manpath -d" are:

Reading config file /etc/man.config
found man directory /usr/share/man
found man directory /usr/X11R6/man
found man directory /usr/local/man
found man directory /usr/kerberos/man
found man directory /usr/lib/perl5/man
found man directory /usr/man
found manpath map /bin --> /usr/share/man
found manpath map /sbin --> /usr/share/man
found manpath map /usr/bin --> /usr/share/man
found manpath map /usr/sbin --> /usr/share/man
found manpath map /usr/local/bin --> /usr/local/man
found manpath map /usr/local/sbin --> /usr/local/man
found manpath map /usr/X11R6/bin --> /usr/X11R6/man
found manpath map /usr/bin/X11 --> /usr/X11R6/man
found manpath map /usr/bin/mh --> /usr/share/man
found manpath map /usr/kerberos/bin --> /usr/kerberos/man
found manpath map /usr/kerberos/sbin --> /usr/kerberos/man

using /usr/bin/less -isr as pager
adding /usr/man to manpath
/usr/man

I'm looking at those last couple of lines and wondering if the adding of /usr/man to
manpath is overriding the previous manpath settings.  I don't see a reference to this in
the man.config file.  Any ideas where this is being added?  I also can't find any
reference to mandb on this system.