rsingh@elaine4.Stanford.EDU (Rajesh Kumar Singh) (06/11/91)
My question is about MANPATH under ultrix (on two different
machines). First the operatings system signatures are:
Ultrix V3.1D (Rev. 54) Worksystem V2.2 System #1: Tue Sep 11 12:24:47 PDT 1990
and Ultrix-32 V3.0 (Rev 64) System #2: Tue Oct 10 11:39:51 PDT 1989
The "man man" gives the following syntax:
man -k keyword...
man -f page_title...
man [-] [-s] [1...8] page_title...
How do I access man pages stored in non-standard places, such
as $HOME/man/man[1-8n]/* or ~friend/man/man[1-8n]/* or
/afs/... ? From the above syntax it is clear that ultrix man
displayer doesn't read the MANPATH environment variable, as
with SunOS, for example?
Locally at Stanford I asked this question three times on
air.unix and twice sent mails to u-ask@air(ASK ULTRIX) but
no satisfactory answers in over three weeks.
Only one consultant pointed out a (seemingly undocumented) swith
-P <dir>. The trouble is it doesn't take an argument like
-P <dir1>:<dir2>:... like most other path specifications.
Help!! --raj (rsingh@leland.stanford.edu)
--
Rajesh Kumar Singh E-mail: rsingh@leland.stanford.edu
Gauls! We have nothing to fear; except perhaps that the sky may fall
on our heads tomorrow. But as we all know, tomorrow never comes!!
-- Adventures of Asterix.grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (06/11/91)
If you have 'perl' installed, you might try perl-man.tar.Z via anon
ftp from foobar.colorado.edu. Here's the feature list.
Features include but are not limited to:
* almost always faster than standard man (try 'man me')
* take much less diskspace for catpages
* supports per-tree tmac macros
* compressed man and cat files
* user-definable man path via $MANPATH or -M optoin
* $MANPATH autoconfigged based on $PATH if not set
* user-definable section search order via -S or $MANSECT. Thus
programmers can get stty(3) before stty(1).
* $PAGER support
* show all the places you would find a man page (-w option)
and in what order.
* display all available man page on a topic (-a option)
* no limits on what subsections go where (if you want to add 7x, ok)
* support for multi-char sections like man1m/*.1m or manavs/*.avs
* man -K for regexp apropos
* grep through all the man pages in $MANPATH
* section and subsection indexing for long man pages
* support for alternate architectures docs on same machine
* ability to run man on a local file
* ability to easily troff (or preview) a man page
* recognizes embedded filter directives for tbl and eqn
* does the right thing for man tree that don't have DBM whatis files
* support for connecting online problem reports to right man page
* there's an extended usage message (man -U) for further help
and to show current defaults.
Here are some features of this version of makewhatis:
* it's faster.
* tries hard to make pretty output, stripping troff directives.
* doesn't blow up on more files in a man directory
than the shell will glob.
* accepts troff string macros for the dashes in the
the NAME section.
* prints a diagnostic for a malformed NAME section.
* detects linked (hard, soft, or via .so) man pages
* finds *all* references in the NAME section.
* recognizes MH's man macros (and .Sh from lwall).
* many other things that makewhatis used to do wrong
Here are some supporting utilities that are included:
* catman -- new version that groks compressed files
* catwhatis -- display the whatis databases
* straycats -- find cat pages with no man page ancestor
* countman -- find how many man pages you can get at
* cfman -- find bad SEE ALSO references in man pagesgrunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (06/11/91)
I'd also like to point out that 'perl-man' isn't my software, I got it from tom christiansen <tchrist@convex.com>.
iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) (06/11/91)
In article <1991Jun10.214332.11539@leland.Stanford.EDU> rsingh@elaine4.Stanford.EDU (Rajesh Kumar Singh) writes: >How do I access man pages stored in non-standard places, such >as $HOME/man/man[1-8n]/* or ~friend/man/man[1-8n]/* or >/afs/... ? From the above syntax it is clear that ultrix man >displayer doesn't read the MANPATH environment variable, as >with SunOS, for example? Get a copy of perl (if you don't have it already) and get a copy of the man written in perl. We use it here on DECstations and Suns. man is available via anonymous ftp from convex.com, I believe. You can get the perl sources from ftp.uu.net. Mike Iglesias University of California, Irvine Internet: iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu BITNET: iglesias@uci uucp: ...!ucbvax!ucivax!iglesias
jwe@che.utexas.edu (John W. Eaton) (06/11/91)
In article <1991Jun10.230854.23545@colorado.edu> grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu writes: > > If you have 'perl' installed, you might try perl-man.tar.Z via anon > ftp from foobar.colorado.edu. Here's the feature list. If not, another alternative is my version of man, apropos, and whatis, written the old fashioned way :-) in C and sh. It's available via anonymous ftp from andy.che.utexas.edu (128.83.162.5) in the directory pub/src/unix. -- John W. Eaton | If the odds are a million to one jwe@che.utexas.edu | against something occurring, chances Department of Chemical Engineering | are 50-50 it will. The University of Texas at Austin | -- fortune(1)
tridge@anu.oz.au (Andrew Tridgell) (06/11/91)
I have a local man directory /u/local/man[1-8] I then do this cd /usr/man/man1 ln -s /u/local/man/man1/* ./ and so on. ie. make soft links, can be easily scripted for easy update. Andrew -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Andrew Tridgell CSLab, Research School of Physical Science tridge@aerodec.anu.edu.au Australian National University =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
grr@cbmvax.commodore.com (George Robbins) (06/11/91)
In article <1991Jun10.214332.11539@leland.Stanford.EDU> rsingh@elaine4.Stanford.EDU (Rajesh Kumar Singh) writes: > > My question is about MANPATH under ultrix (on two different > machines). > > How do I access man pages stored in non-standard places, such > as $HOME/man/man[1-8n]/* or ~friend/man/man[1-8n]/* or > /afs/... ? From the above syntax it is clear that ultrix man > displayer doesn't read the MANPATH environment variable, as > with SunOS, for example? > > Only one consultant pointed out a (seemingly undocumented) swith > -P <dir>. The trouble is it doesn't take an argument like > -P <dir1>:<dir2>:... like most other path specifications. The Ultrix man program is quite antiquated. It will search a limited and poorly specified set of subdirectories (at least [12345678lno]). On my system /usr/man/manl and /usr/man/man are symbolic links to /usr/local/man/manl, etc, to allow segregating the local manual pages from those distributed with Ultrix. Unfortunatly, this means modifying the installtion scripts of most packages that expect to drop their cruft into the system 1-8 manual sections. You could create a csh alias or /local/bin script for man that does "man -Pwhatever "$*" || man "$*", or install one of the various "man" replacemnts that have been posted in the source groups. Also, the versions of the Berkely man command in the Tahoe and Reno sources are redistributable so you could use/install either of them. The Tahoe verion is probably the better, since it more or less compatible with the Sun and similar versions. The Reno version is more flexible in some ways, but expects *all* manual pages to to be preformatted and have a ".0" suffix, which is incompatible with previous (i.e. Ultrix) notions. -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing: domain: grr@cbmvax.commodore.com Commodore, Engineering Department phone: 215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)
peirce@gumby.cc.wmich.edu (Leonard J. Peirce) (06/11/91)
In article <1991Jun10.214332.11539@leland.Stanford.EDU> rsingh@elaine4.Stanford.EDU (Rajesh Kumar Singh) writes: > >My question is about MANPATH under ultrix (on two different >machines). MANPATH doesn't work on the man included with ULTRIX. It's easy to take the 4.3BSD man command and hack it up to work with ULTRIX (so that it supports multiple character extensions, etc.) if you have access to the 4.3 source. I did and I replace DEC's man as one of my first tasks after upgrading ULTRIX. There are also a number of free man implementations that are available. Tom Christiansen wrote one in perl that is available via anonymous FTP from tut.cis.ohio-state.edu in the pub/perl/scripts/tchrist directory. John Eaton at U of Texas also wrote one that is available from andy.che.utexas.edu in the pub/src/unix directory. There are others out there but I can't remem- ber where they are. Are you listening, DEC? -- Leonard J. Peirce Internet: peirce@gumby.cc.wmich.edu Western Michigan University peirce@gw.wmich.edu Academic Computing Services UUCP: ...!uunet!sharkey!wmichgw!peirce Kalamazoo, MI 49008 Phone: (616) 387-5469 "Answer that, it may be the phone." -- Anthony Wachs, TONY IN RH20 LAND