Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cbmvax!grr From: grr@cbmvax.commodore.com (George Robbins) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Manual pages located in NON-STANDARD places in Ultrix Keywords: MANPATH, Ultrix, man pages, man man, help! Message-ID: <22324@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 11 Jun 91 08:31:27 GMT References: <1991Jun10.214332.11539@leland.Stanford.EDU> Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.commodore.com (George Robbins) Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 38 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 $HOME/man/man[1-8n]/* or ~friend/man/man[1-8n]/* or > /afs/... ? From the above syntax it is clear that ultrix man > displayer doesn't read the MANPATH environment variable, as > with SunOS, for example? > > Only one consultant pointed out a (seemingly undocumented) swith > -P . The trouble is it doesn't take an argument like > -P ::... like most other path specifications. The Ultrix man program is quite antiquated. It will search a limited and poorly specified set of subdirectories (at least [12345678lno]). On my system /usr/man/manl and /usr/man/man are symbolic links to /usr/local/man/manl, etc, to allow segregating the local manual pages from those distributed with Ultrix. Unfortunatly, this means modifying the installtion scripts of most packages that expect to drop their cruft into the system 1-8 manual sections. You could create a csh alias or /local/bin script for man that does "man -Pwhatever "$*" || 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)