[OpenIndiana-discuss] man pages to solaris cmds

Harry Putnam reader at newsguy.com
Mon Dec 20 02:46:31 UTC 2010


Calum Mackay <calum.mackay at cdmnet.org> writes:

> hi Harry,
>
>> What is the MANPATH to the solaris cmds that there are also gnu
>> versions of.
>
> 	man -M /usr/share/man ls
>
> is what you're after :)
>
> Assuming your MANPATH is by default:
>
> 	/usr/gnu/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/X11/share/man
>
> so you get the GNU man pages first...

Nice ... thanks


Mike Gerdts <mgerdts at gmail.com> writes:


[...]

Calum M wrote:

>> so you get the GNU man pages first...
>
> And if you don't set your MANPATH, it will man will give you the man
> page that is appropriate for your path.  For most users, having
> MANPATH set is more likely to do harm than good.

Mine isn't set, but I've been able to do man /bin/ls in the past
.. not sure why not now.

> http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/PSARC/2007/688/20071212_mike.gerdts

I couldn't make heads or tails of that. . sorry.


Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> writes:

> On 12/18/10 05:04 PM, Harry Putnam wrote:
>> What is the MANPATH to the solaris cmds that there are also gnu
>> versions of.
>
> /usr/share/man
>
>> /bin/ls  for example
>> 
>> If I call man /bin/ls
>> 
>> I get warnings about opening a binary file, and when the man page
>> opens there is lots of guff in it like escape sequences.
>
> Strange - works for me on S11 Express - not sure what OI could have
> done to break it.   (It is a little known feature that man will take
> the command path to find the matching man page - not sure when it was
> added.)

I've been able to do it from before opensolaris 134... not sure how
long before, but 133 for sure.

I may have caused the problem with it myself by setting $LANG.

I have had a problem reading man pages from the start on oi 148. I
don't mean `man /bin/ls' but just the normal usage.

 Someone advised me to set LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1.  When I did that, it
does cure my on-going problem, .... but now wondering if when calling
`man /bin/ls' ... it may act differently with LANG set that way.

Yup... I just tested that theory out.

When I do a fresh login (to oi 148) $LANG is en_US.UTF-8.  On that
setting all man pages have goofy characters like this (from man ls)


  DESCRIPTION
       List  information  about the FILEs (the current directory by
       default).  Sort entries alphabetically if none of  ââctuvSUX
       nor ââsort.

But I can call `man /bin/ls' and it opens the right page... with no
warnings about binary, but it does have the guff above in it.

If I set LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 then man pages open nice and clean but
it does cause the warnings about binary files (and fail) if I should
try `man /bin/ls'  with that setting.

Another poster here or on openindiana explained it best he could to me
and seems a mismatch of some sort between my terminal program and
$LANG setting.  I can correct if I happen to be using putty from
windows, but logging in from linux or another solaris machine... I'm
not really sure what terminal program is involved... the TERM setting
when from linux is `TERM=linux', when from solaris TERM=sun-color.

But what actual program is running the terminal... I don't know for sure.




More information about the OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list