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I have a feeling this will be one of those linux questions that no one responds to, but here goes, anyway:
I'm running SuSE 8.0 Pro on a fairly muscular box. Out of the blue, when I run "man" on any topic that's NOT in section 1 (e.g. "man syslogd"), I get this: "gdbm fatal: read error". I use "man" a lot, so it's kind of a pain.
I searched around in Google groups and also here at Linux Q's, but I didn't find enough info to go on, except that someone mentioned "xman", which I now use instead and which works fine. But I really do want to find out what has gone wrong, so I can fix it properly. I haven't learned yet how to completely reinstall the man pages or system or whatever it is, but it seems some other posters tried that and it didn't help. SuSE support is pretty useless, as usual.
PROBLEM:
---------------
I had exactly the same problem with SusE:
1. Many of the "man" pages worked OK (example: "man ls" => NO PROBLEM)
2. Most "man" lookups, however, failed:
man connect =>
"gdbm fatal: read error".
3. If I did an "apropos SUBJECT", then specified the section, it worked:
a) man connect
<= GDBM FATAL: READ ERROR
b) apropos connect
<= THE SOCKETS "CONNECT()" API DOCUMENTED IN SECTION 2
c) man 2 connect
<= THIS WORKS OK
CAUSE:
-----------
I tried a "mandb -c" to recreate the index, and discovered "whatis" couldn't
parse many (about 300 or so) man pages.
In other words, the global "man" index could not be build because of
numerous local "whatis" parse errors.
EXAMPLE:
a) su - root
b) mandb -c =>mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/eyuvtoppm.1.gz: whatis parse for eyuvtoppm(1) failed
mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/pnmtotiffcmyk.1.gz: whatis parse for pnmtotiffcmyk(1) failed
mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/pgmnoise.1.gz: whatis parse for pgmnoise(1) failed
<= MANY MORE ERRORS LIKE THIS
SOLUTION:
----------------
Rebuild the "man" index using "mandb -csp" instead of "mandb -c"
<= THIS SUCCESSFULLY REBUILDS THE "MAN" INDEXES
YOU SHOULD NO LONGER GET ANY "GDBM" ERRORS ... EVEN
THE OFFENDING PAGES (LIKE "pgmnoise") SHOULD WORK OK
I had the same issue when I installed new programs. Everything would install fine, but when it came to install the mandb for the program it would say gdbm fatal error. I issued the command sudo mandb -c it went through and look for all the mandb files and corrected the errors. Now when I install a program and it comes to install the mandb I don't get that error. Cudos my friend for the find... Simply awsome..
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