Man pages Help Mr. Wizard!!

I read some discussion from last summer, and I think that I did learn something, perhaps, maybe. . .? manpath is not an environment variable path sort of thing, but an executable designed by those who know better than us ordinary mortals? When I entered the command, I got this lisitng:
/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man. . .
from what I can tell from some books that I have been reading, it looks like the man pages are getting buried one directory, share, deeper than what is normally expected. Is that correct? If so, that might explain why installations such as Lua, Fink, Links or other Unix applications man pages are not showing up when one calls up a page for them.
Am I anywhere in the ball park?
Thank you for your time oh great and wise one.

Hi danuke,
In some systems man pages are in /usr/man/ and /usr/local/man/. But on MacOSX (and many other systems), pre-installed man pages are in /usr/share/man/, and the default location of man pages for user-installed commands is /usr/local/share/man/. But, some Unix apps will install man pages in /usr/local/man/ by default.
When I entered the command, I got this lisitng:
/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man. . .
What command did you enter? "echo $MANPATH" ?
If your MANPATH environment variable is set to the above value, do you know where MANPATH is set to the value? In your shell startup file?
On MacOSX, MANPATH is not set at all by default. Instead, default location of man pages are listed in /usr/share/misc/man.conf. If you look into this file, then you will find the default locations are /usr/share/man, /usr/local/share/man and /usr/X11R6/man. If MANPATH environment variable is set, however, the locations listed in man.conf will be ignored.
If you have already installed many man pages in /usr/local/man/, then
(a) add /usr/loal/man in /usr/share/misc/man.conf, and remove the definition of MANPATH in the shell startup file (such as .bash_profile) or wherever it may be set.
(b) or set MANPATH in your shell startup file
export MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/X11R6/man
If you are installing a new Unix app from source and want to install its man page into /usr/local/share/man, then
./configure --mandir=/usr/local/share/man
will work in most of the cases.
PowerMacG4, PowerBookG4, iMac(C2D) Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Hope it helps !!
P.S. POSIX is a *nix standardization effort.
Last edited by Onwards (2009-01-17 18:35:11)

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Hi, I'm still pretty new at the command line. I installed growlnotify to play around with it, but the install script puts the man page in the wrong place (/usr/local/man/man1). I found a post that said it should be moved to /usr/local/share/man/man1, but that directory doesn't exist.
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Message was edited by: aaronfalls

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Completion of Man Pages in bash [SOLVED]

Sorry to post such a trivial topic, but the irc channel was unfortunately less than helpful.
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Last edited by egan (2010-02-07 23:13:25)

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[SOLVED] Weird characters in man pages

Hi,
I remember I had read a similar thread, but I can't find it anymore.
My problem is that man pages show strange characters and it's quite difficult to read at times. Here is an example:
The traditional protocol for writing to someone is that the string <80><98>-o', either at the end of a line or on a line by itself, means that it's the other person's turn to talk. The string
<80><98>oo' means that the person believes the conversation to be over.
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Thanks.
Last edited by finferflu (2008-02-27 17:53:23)

Hello
Here is a post on that problem if you can read french : http://forums.archlinuxfr.org/viewtopic.php?id=1084
The members suggested to replace
export LESSCHARSET="utf8"
by
export LESSCHARSET="UTF-8"
in /etc/profile.
One suggest to replace the line inside /etc/man.conf (from the gentoo wiki fr)
NROFF iconv -f utf8 -t iso8859-1 | /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin1 -c -mandoc
I must admit that it doesn't work for me neither, and the above does not solve the problem. The file I tested is UTF-8 encoded and the LESSCHARSET defined to use UTF-8 gives badly accentuated characters (But at least printable characters). I think you will have to tweak a little these lines, but it's a start.
Note that these lines suit (or don't suit) french man pages, but you may have to change the given charsets (especially latin1).
Hope it will help you search
Cilyan
Edit: Ah, time to write the answer, the problem is solved !
Edit2: The tip given by dyscoria does not work for me.
Last edited by Cilyan (2008-02-27 18:01:57)

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[img=http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/184/dsc00185hj0.th.jpg]
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Yeah... it worked like a charm!
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[Solved] Looking for arch's original man page color codes

Hey everyone. I'm new to arch, and enjoying having everything begin to work out for me. One thing I was wondering though is what the color codes are that the man pages use before X is loaded or anything similar.
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Last edited by zematis (2014-05-12 22:21:30)

ayekat, thanks for the warm welcome!
ayekat wrote:What article in the wiki?
Here's the section in the Wiki I was referring to:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ma … vt-unicode
karol wrote:Are you talking about using man pages before installing Arch or after installing but in the tty? Do you want to get the same colors in X?
(I think) I was talking about the colors that the man pages are in the TTY. Specifically, my processes is:
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Login (X yet not started)
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Startx - boot to window manager (i3)
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# This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to
# the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it
# and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want
# To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See
# http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details.
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Search the forum for this issue, its been brought up many times.

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Hi There,
Just trying to backup our web hosting server using rsync but can't figure out how to add a log file.
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Man pages wont work

i updated my system with pacman and now when i try to use a man page i get this:
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Last edited by thoron (2009-04-04 21:27:08)

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Man pages Help Mr. Wizard!!

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