Package: man-db
Version: 2.9.4-2
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
X-Debbugs-Cc: debbug.man...@sideload.33mail.com
Searching the whole DB for a whole word requires using --regex and
then using word boundaries. So to find pages that reference the TZ
environment variable, this *should* work (in principle):
$ man -aK --regex '\<TZ\>'
It appears to work because it finds many pages. But it misses the
“tree” package (/usr/share/man/man1/tree.1.gz).
$ zgrep 'TZ' /usr/share/man/man1/tree.1.gz
\fBTZ\fP Timezone for timefmt output, see \fBstrftime\fP(3).
As you can see, the nroff language intereferes with matching the
regular expression as “TZ” is surrounded by code. Users of man-db
obviously do not intend to have their regex matched against nroff
code. Thus operations are being performed in the wrong order. The
regular expression matching needs to happen on nroff-decoded text.
$ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/tree.1.gz | nroff -man | grep '\<TZ\>'
TZ Timezone for timefmt output, see strftime(3).
* Workaround *
One approach:
$ find /usr/share/man/ -iname \*gz -exec zcat {} + | nroff -man | grep
'\<'"$whole_word"'\>'
In rare situations such as environment variable searches, case
sensitivity can be leveraged:
$ man -aKI --regex TZ
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.5
APT prefers oldstable-updates
APT policy: (990, 'oldstable-updates'), (990, 'oldstable-security'), (990,
'testing'), (990, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-19-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages man-db depends on:
ii bsdextrautils 2.36.1-8+deb11u1
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.77
ii dpkg 1.20.12
ii groff-base 1.22.4-6
ii libc6 2.31-13+deb11u5
ii libgdbm6 1.19-2
ii libpipeline1 1.5.3-1
ii libseccomp2 2.5.1-1+deb11u1
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.11.dfsg-2+deb11u2
man-db recommends no packages.
Versions of packages man-db suggests:
ii apparmor 2.13.6-10
ii elinks [www-browser] 0.13.2-1+b1
ii firefox-esr [www-browser] 102.6.0esr-1~deb11u1
pn groff <none>
ii less 551-2
ii lynx [www-browser] 2.9.0dev.6-3~deb11u1
ii ungoogled-chromium [www-browser] 90.0.4430.212-1.sid1
ii w3m [www-browser] 0.5.3+git20210102-6
-- debconf information:
man-db/install-setuid: false
man-db/auto-update: true
