On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 00:36:42 +0000, Tommy Wareing wrote:
>On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 08:23:18PM -0500, Matthew O. Persico wrote:
>>>>MANPATH=/opt/perl/lib/perl5/man:/usr/lib/perl5/man
>>>>
>>>>Apparently, unlike Solaris and any other *NIX system I have used,
>>>>MANPATH is not additive - it REPLACES all other heuristics for
>>>>locating manpages.
>
>Eh? You get exactly the same behaviour under Solaris. man defaults
>to looking in <somewhere> (see your documentation for the exact
>location). Setting MANPATH overrides this.
>
Not in Solaris 2.6 or 2.7. Unless our admins did some very strong
magic and changed the defaults upon installation, which I doubt.
{wait.. think...light bulb!} Then again, come to think of it, I think
MANPATH is initialized someplace (like /etc/profile?) during the
login sequence. Yes, I think that's it. So the masking behaviour is
itself masked due to initialization. Ok, I'll buy that.
[snip]
>>>>So, I unset MANPATH and did man man and it said to check out
>>>>/usr/etc/man.config and man man.conf(5). Well, neither the file
>>>>nor the manpage exist on my system.
>
>Mine (Mandrake 9.0) actually says /usr//etc/man.config. Which by
>convention tends to me /etc/man.config (stuff// being interpreted as
>/)
Huh? I type
ls -lart /usr//etc
and I get zero files, because /usr/etc is empty on my machine. Where did you pick up
that convention?
>>>>
>>>>How does one ADD man paths to the lookup heuristics?
>>>
>>>MANPATH = $MANPATH:/new/dir/goes/here:/another/new/dir
>>>
>
>>This does not work. A default Mandrake install does not initialize
>>MANPATH at all. By setting MANPATH, I override all the settings in
>>/etc/man.config. Yes, it's weird. No, I've not seen this in any *
>>NIX system I've ever worked on. But there it is.
>
>You're using a different version of Solaris from me then (and I've
>got >2.5, 7 and 8). I've always known it to work like this.
>
Yes, I agree. See above.
>>
>>Now, I could, someplace in /etc/profile.d/foobar.sh do this:
>>
>>MANPATH=$(manpath)
>
>>From the parameter expansion section of the bash manpage:
>
>MANPATH=${MANPATH:-<default>}:/new/dir/goes/here:/another/new/dir
>will do what you want (using <default> if MANPATH isn't set).
>
>So the only problem is how to determine the default. Our Solaris
>setup consists of MANPATH=${MANPATH:-/usr/man}:/usr/local/man
>
>However, the Mandrake 8.2 man comes with the manpath command:
>manpath - determine user's search path for man pages
>
>So you can simplify all this to:
>MANPATH=`manpath`:/new/dir/goes/here
Yes, I could do that. However, the only reason I am playing with
MANPATH at all is that I have developed some bash functions to swap
versions of Perl. I modify PATH to get at the one I want. I was also
modifying MANPATH. I may just decide to just use perldoc instead. Or
maybe not. Depends on how much I want to muck around. I have real
work to do to.
Thanks.
--
Matthew O. Persico
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