[X-Unix] 10.4: manpath seems not to be working properly

[William H. Magill]

On 17 May, 2005, at 09:59, Jason Verlander wrote:

> After _upgrading_ to 10.4 I've found that manpath is not analyzing  
> and finding man pages for items that have been placed into /usr/ 
> local/bin with the man pages being put into /usr/local/man. I have / 
> usr/local/bin in my path and manpath should automatically add /usr/ 
> local/man to my search path it seems. At least, that's the way the  
> manpath man page seems to indicates.
>
> Anyone seen this or have any thoughts on how I might resolve it?

Apple evidently switched "man" commands in Tiger.

While Darwin has historically been based on FreeBSD, it appears that  
Apple has picked up the man system for Tiger from OpenBSD.

FreeBSD 5.3 still supports "/etc/manpath.config".

OpenBSD 3.7 supports "/etc/man.conf"

Apple (Darwin) has picked up "/usr/share/misc/man.conf

The "man" binary seems to be version "1.5o1" -- but there is no  
further source or version information in the binary.

I suspect that this version of man is the one also found in most  
Linux distros now.

OS X 1.4 does not define a MANPATH variable by default (/etc/profile  
or /etc/csh.cshrc).

BTW: Note that the environment variable is MANPATH (all caps), not  
manpath.

Note also: The Apple version of man apparently will read config files  
from:

/usr/share/misc/man.conf
/usr/share/misc/man.config
/etc/man.conf
/etc/man.config
/usr/lib/man.conf
/usr/lib/man.config


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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