Hi, would love some help:

I am using the most recent version of Ubuntu. I am trying to use the 'man' command, however no matter what I type the response is:

daria@daria-MacBookPro:/usr/bin$ man ls
No manual entry for ls
See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.
daria@daria-MacBookPro:/usr/bin$ man 7 undocumented
No manual entry for undocumented in section 7
daria@daria-MacBookPro:/usr/bin$

No idea what to do about this. Some things I have tried from other threads, that I don't entirely know how to interpret:

daria@daria-MacBookPro:/usr/bin$ which man
/usr/bin/man

daria@daria-MacBookPro:/usr/bin$ mandb
mandb: warning: $MANPATH set, ignoring /etc/manpath.config
0 man subdirectories contained newer manual pages.
0 manual pages were added.
0 stray cats were added.
0 old database entries were purged.


daria@daria-MacBookPro:/usr/bin$ $echo $MANPATH
bash: /usr/local/man:/usr/local/mysql/man:/usr/local/git/man:/usr/local/man: No such file or directory

is this because man is in /usr/bin/man but the path is /usr/local/man? if so, how do I fix this?

Thank you

You can temporarily override it.

$ MANPATH=/usr/share/man man ls

package coreutils has file /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz, so at worse?

$ man /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz

or

$ man 1 ls

depending on how retro your utilities are. My man man shows /etc/manpath.config to contain the default paths.

$ cat /etc/manpath.config | grep -v ^#

The grep to omit comments. But maybe a debian-ism. You could also:

$ unset MANPATH

If the warning --- mandb: warning: $MANPATH set, ignoring /etc/manpath.config --- is of concern.

$ which man

To see what location is being assumed for your binary. Or just full path it:

$ /usr/bin/man ls

To check for embellishments you might try:

$ alias man

or

$ \man

To ensure that an alias isn't used. Lots of little *nix-isms to fiddle about with.

1 members found this post helpful.

Oh neat, thank you, MANPATH=/usr/share/man man ls works! How do I permanently fix the path?

probably you need to insert it into /etc/manpath.config

$ export MANPATH=/usr/share/man
$ man ls

Although something is probably setting it at boot / login, and it would need to permanently be changed there. Perhaps .bashrc? Or /etc/profile? Or /etc/skel/.bashrc?

1 members found this post helpful.

Although the lazy in me would probably make an alias.

alias man='MANPATH=/usr/share/man man'

Looks like the ls alias is a part of my .bashrc (debian default). So that would probably need to be in .bashrc for it to persist.

No, the ls alias is usually just to add color to the ls command. Aliases are sourced in .bashrc. But user-generated ones are stored in some other file.