dvu%pyr@gatech.edu (Dinh Vu) (03/04/89)
The man command with the option k (man -k) does not work on my SunOS 3.5.
Is this a bug? Is any one else have the same problem?
Is there a patch if this is a bug? Thanks.
Dinh Vu
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!gitpyr!dvu
[[ "man -k" uses the file "/usr/man/whatis". This is built with the
"catman" command (see "catman(8)"). Is this your problem? --wnl ]]hart@cs.utexas.edu (Howard Hart) (03/17/89)
In article <7343@pyr.gatech.EDU> dvu%pyr@gatech.edu (Dinh Vu) writes: >The man command with the option k (man -k) does not work on my SunOS 3.5. > >[[ "man -k" uses the file "/usr/man/whatis". This is built with the >"catman" command (see "catman(8)"). Is this your problem? --wnl ]] Since catman takes up an additional 8 MB which we don't have to spare, I took the shortcut and ran /usr/lib/makewhatis in the /usr/man directory. I end up with some additional garbage for my man -k output but it still seems to work OK. I also noticed a Pyramid computer running BSD4.3 UNIX with an entry for /usr/lib/makewhatis in its crontab. I'm not sure why you'd want to update the whatis database periodically but maybe that's what removes the additional garbage I keep seeing. [[ Whoops. Sorry...catman does more than just make the whatis database. However, "catman -w" will just make "whatis". Of course it does this by just running the script "makewhatis", so the results are the same. I'm disappointed that Sun took out the BUGS section of the catman manual page. Maybe they thought it would confuse those without a sense of humor. It used to say "Acts oddly on nights with full moons." --wnl ]]
moran@warbucks.ai.sri.com (Doug Moran) (03/17/89)
The following is a bug report that I sent to hotline@sun.com. The problem with "man -k" was already a known bug (bugid: 1011438) and is scheduled to be fixed in 4.1. The man command was upgraded to use the MANPATH variable and to have the value of the -M operand be a set of paths to search for manual entries. Bug: for the -k operand, "man" looks only at the whatis database in the first entry on the list. I have set my MANPATH variable to "/usr/local/man:/usr/man" and when I execute "man -k sign" I get only the entries for man pages in /usr/local/man. If I type "man -M /usr/man -k sign", I get those in /usr/man (proving the whatis database exists). Workaround: manual cat together the whatis databases from the various directories on the path, replacing the whatis database in the first directory on that path. Incompatibility: the -M operand in the catman command is a directory and not a list of paths as in the man command. For compatibility this -M operand should be the same as in man, and if omitted it should default to the value of MANPATH before defaulting to /usr/man.