Question about /usr/ucb/man -P option

Leonard Peirce peirce at gumby.cc.wmich.edu
Wed Jul 4 00:25:29 AEST 1990


In article <268F712E.9253 at orion.oac.uci.edu> iglesias at orion.oac.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) writes:
>In article <12989 at cbmvax.commodore.com> grr at cbmvax (George Robbins) writes:
>>Have you considered using symlinks to make your man directory show up as
>>/usr/man/manx?  This works for us, although it seems to require that the
>>suffixes on the man entries match the subdirectory to some extent...
> [...]
>                                               Sun's man has a -M
>option to set the man path, so as part of the Sun executable library we
>have a shell script called 'man' that does a 'man -M path:path2 ...'.
>Users put the library executable path before /usr/ucb and it all works.

Or even better, you can just set the MANPATH environment variable and
achieve the same results.

The man command and related programs that come with ULTRIX are admittedly
poor.  I took a copy of the 4.3 man and made a few small hacks so that it
will work with ULTRIX.  I also added code for a default MANPATH so if some-
forgets to set it, they will still pick up both the ULTRIX man pages and our
local stuff.

At USENIX in January, I was told by someone in the ULTRIX development group
that 4.0 will support alternate search paths.  But I'm not holding my breath.
--
Leonard Peirce                  Internet:  peirce at gumby.cc.wmich.edu
Western Michigan University                peirce at gw.wmich.edu
Academic Computer Center        UUCP:      ...!uunet!sharkey!wmichgw!peirce
Kalamazoo, MI  49008            Phone:     (616) 387-5469



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