man command not working.....used to work before!!!

devayani · 09-24-2007, 05:32 AM

Hi,

I am a newbie, I used the man command frequently but since the day I tried the installation of a software , it shows "No manual entry for ls" for any command that I give.

$PATH=/usr/local/lheasoft/Linux_2.2_i686/scripts:/usr/local/lheasoft/Linux_2.2_i686/bin:/home/savitri/Desktop/Devayani/isdc-software/osa_sw_6.0/bin:/home/savitri/Desktop/Devayani/isdc-software/osa_sw_6.0/root/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin/:/usr/games:/home/savitri/bin

Why is this happening?

Regards

Devayani

LuLoh · 09-24-2007, 05:58 AM

Hi,
in my installation I have no MANPATH variable defined (echo $MANPATH reports nothing), so this variable is not really
needed. Do you have a file like /etc/manpath.config ?
What is the output of the command 'manpath' ? (don't know if it existe on your installation)
Have you tried to give the path to any man page manually (with the -M option), something like:
man -M /usr/share/man/en/ ls
(the directory must contain a file like ls.1.gz, of course)
Depending on your distribution, have you tried to check the installation of your man command and the corresponding man
pages (maybe something is wrong with them...)
Hope that helps.

Saludos.

matthewg42 · 09-24-2007, 08:42 AM

If you have locate installed, here's a handy little command to generate a MANPATH statement for you:

Code:

echo -n export MANPATH=\" ; locate -r '/man$' | while read d; do [ -d "$d" ] && echo -n $d:; done ; echo \"

You can copy-paste the output of that command to your .bashrc or .profile or whatever is appropriate for your shell, and then when you next log in you will have the MANPATH set automatically.