man pages don't display
 

I didn't realize it first, because i'm a newbie and i saw it's easier to do anything when you are root. But the problem is that the man pages won't display unless if i am logged in as root. And i have some friends who asked me to let them see how linux works, you understand... Can you help me? 10x
( I work on Fedora Core 3 )

please expand on "won't display"... any error messages? blank screen? what?

10x? is that "thanks"? i'd suggest taking the extra 1/2 a second for those other 3 keys... ;)

Maybe regular users don't have permissions to access /usr/share/man or the manpages.

Anyway, as acid_kewpie suggested, post error messages and

post the output of

ls -l /usr/share/man/

When i type "man <command>" it simply appears nothing and i have to type "q" to exit. I have no error messages.

~> ls -l /usr/share/man
total 592
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 bg
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 cs
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 da
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 de
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 el
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 en
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 es
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 fi
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 fr
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 hr
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:46 hu
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:46 id
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 it
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 ja
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 ko
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:50 man0p
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 69632 Apr 28 20:44 man1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:50 man1p
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Apr 28 16:07 man2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 155648 Apr 28 16:09 man3
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 40960 Apr 28 15:50 man3p
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 28 16:10 man4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Apr 28 16:10 man5
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 28 16:04 man6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 28 16:09 man7
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 20480 Apr 28 16:10 man8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 2004 man9
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 2004 mann
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 nl
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 pl
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 pt
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:46 pt_BR
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 ro
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:49 ru
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:49 sk
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 13 2004 sl
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 28 15:50 sv
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 28 20:44 zh

This is clearly a permission problem somewhere, because it works as root. It probably does display an error message, but it gets cleared away from the screen before you can read it. You can capture it into a file and read it from there: