man (-k option)

Doug Moran moran at warbucks.ai.sri.com
Fri Mar 17 12:50:22 AEST 1989


The following is a bug report that I sent to hotline at sun.com.  The problem
with "man -k" was already a known bug (bugid: 1011438) and is scheduled to
be fixed in 4.1.

The man command was upgraded to use the MANPATH variable and to have the
value of the -M operand be a set of paths to search for manual entries.

Bug: for the -k operand, "man" looks only at the whatis database in
	the first entry on the list.  I have set my MANPATH variable
	to "/usr/local/man:/usr/man" and when I execute "man -k sign"
	I get only the entries for man pages in /usr/local/man.
	If I type "man -M /usr/man -k sign", I get those in /usr/man
	(proving the whatis database exists).
Workaround: manual cat together the whatis databases from the various
	directories on the path, replacing the whatis database in the
	first directory on that path.

Incompatibility: the -M operand in the catman command is a directory
	and not a list of paths as in the man command.  For compatibility
	this -M operand should be the same as in man, and if omitted it
	should default to the value of MANPATH before defaulting to /usr/man.



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