Hi,

When a user is in a jail shell, or chroot shell, the man page can't be displayed correctly (a blank page with only <END>).
I can see no error.

I used strace to compare a standard user with the user in jail (user: test) and can't find much difference. Man seems to find the zip file (ie. ping in this test)

Running Centos 6.2, jailkit.

If you have any idea how to make the page displayed, any settings (manpath, ...), permissions to apply to the manual, let me know.

Here is the log of strace for the user test (in jail).

Thanks in advance.

have you checked the variable PAGER? How is it set?

Thank a lot for your reply.

The variable PAGE is set to less in :
/home/jail/./etc/man.config
=> PAGER /usr/bin/less -is
/etc/man.config
=> PAGER /usr/bin/less -is

=========================================
Just did that check in case.
echo $PAGER
<nothing for both std user & jailed user>

env | grep PAGER
<nothing for both std user & jailed user>

I suppose that man is just using the settings for internal use.

Any other idea?


===========================================
Additional info:

/usr/bin/gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | less -is
Since man seems to find the "gz file" looking at the trace, I just tried to unzip it using the "test" user. And that can be displayed using "less -is".

Hello again.

I did some progress using man -d "command" ie. man -d ls.

Here is what is coming out :

(cd "/usr/share/man" && (echo ".ll 12.8i"; echo ".nr LL 12.8i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /usr/bin/gunzip -c '/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz'; echo ".\\\""; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null | /usr/bin/less -is)

And when I execute :

# cd "/usr/share/man" && (echo ".ll 12.8i"; echo ".nr LL 12.8i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /usr/bin/gunzip -c '/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz'; echo ".\\\""; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl

The answer is :

/usr/bin/nroff: line 78: [: too many arguments

I ve tried the same command with a user not in the jail, and the problem does not occur . The page is formatted correctly.

Any idea/hint about that would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

you can try to redirect the output of gtbl into a file and compare (for jailed and normal user).

Thank you for the reply.

I did, the files are the same.

So, I am coming to another conclusion. Something wrong with the charset.

When I execute separately /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc, I get a
WARNING: old character encoding and/or character set

Which seems to have a strong relation with my issue...now, what is the problem with that charset.

based on the man page: http://www.unix.com/man-page/Linux/1/nroff/ probably you have different locale settings or a related environment variable is not set...

Thanks.

I found where was the problem, thanks to your man page about groff. Since nroff is just a wrapper, I tried to execute :

cd "/usr/share/man" && (echo ".ll 12.8i"; echo ".nr LL 12.8i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /usr/bin/gunzip -c '/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz'; echo ".\\\""; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/groff -Tutf8 -C mandoc

This told me that grotty was not accessible.

I changed the permission on the file so it could be executed, and boom, the man page came up.

Problem solved. Thanks for your time.

what a surprise!








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