man page is not found although $MANPATH and man.conf changed

Abbraxas · 09-04-2011, 05:30 PM

Hi all,
I have got something like a problem.
I downloaded the sourcefiles for the programm diction.

Now here is the clue:
the programm is executable and works fine but if I type 'man diction' I get the error message that the manpage was not found.

Then I changed the env.var. $MANPATH and added the directory where the source files are stored, but nothing.

Next I added the directory of the src in the config file of the manpages.

Then I though, oh wait, is there ANY manpage?

The answer is yes, there is, and with the usual name "diction.1".
And I am able to open it with less, beeing formatted as expected.

But here is the question: why does my approach not work on the problem?
What have I to do, so that the manpage for diction is found by using the command "man diction"???

Abbraxas

I forgot to metion that I copied the diction.1 file also into the /usr/local/man/man1 directory

sag47 · 09-04-2011, 05:58 PM

Double check the permissions and ownership compared to other man pages.

On my system the man pages are all own/group to root and have 644 permissions unless they're a symbolic link (which have 777).

Test out the page to be sure it formats correctly. Man can use a relative path (usually used for testing or developement).

Code:

man ./diction.1

On my system man1 is located in /usr/share/man/man1 but not sure if that's the required path for your system.

Abbraxas · 09-05-2011, 06:06 AM

Hey,
now it works, had to move it to /usr/share/man/man1
but I found the directory man in more than one parentdirectory,
for example:
/usr/local/man
/usr/local/share/man
/usr/man

but where is the difference?! because in every man/* there are the same files...

sag47 · 09-05-2011, 06:40 PM

There are people who explain this better than me. So I shall defer to them.

You tend to realize it when you start compiling your own software. But that post I gave you (at least from the Red Hat perspective) is how I treat it.

And as far as I know man pages should only be in either /usr/share/man/ or /usr/local/share/man/ unless you want to follow your own convention. That's why it's a convention and not a requirement so other distro's could make it different.