Installing Man-1.5k

Estimated build time:           0.05 SBU
Estimated required disk space:  2 MB

Installation of Man

Run the following commands to install man:

patch -Np1 -i ../man-1.5k.patch &&
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/bin \
    ./configure -default -confdir=/etc &&
make &&
make install

Note: If you wish to disable SGR escape sequences, you should edit the man.conf file and add the -c argument to nroff.

You may want to take a look at the man hint at http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/man.txt, which deals with formatting and compression issues for man pages.

Command explanations

PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/bin ./configure -default: The paths to some programs get written into man's files. Unfortunately, the configure script picks the last location in PATH rather than the first where a program is found. By appending /usr/bin:/bin to PATH for the ./configure command, we make sure that man doesn't use the /static versions of our programs.

patch -Np1 -i ../man-1.5k.patch: This patch comments out one of the files in the man.conf file (MANPATH /usr/man) because it will create redundant results when using programs like whatis. It also adds the -R option to the PAGER variable so man pages are displayed properly.

Contents of Man

Last checked against version 1.5k.

Program Files

apropos, makewhatis, man, man2dvi, man2html and whatis

Descriptions

apropos

apropos searches for keywords in a set of database files, containing short descriptions of system commands, and displays the result on the standard output.

makewhatis

makewhatis reads all the manual pages contained in given sections of manpath or the pre-formatted pages contained in the given sections of catpath. For each page, it writes a line in the whatis database. Each line consists of the name of the page and a short description, separated by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of the NAME section of the manual page.

man

man formats and displays the on-line manual pages.

man2dvi

man2dvi converts a manual page into dvi format.

man2html

man2html converts a manual page into html.

whatis

whatis searches for keywords in a set of database files, containing short descriptions of system commands, and displays the result on the standard output. Only complete word matches are displayed.

Man Installation Dependencies

Last checked against version 1.5i2.

Bash: sh
Binutils: as, ld
Fileutils: chmod, cp, install, mkdir, rm
Gcc: c11, collect2, cpp0, gcc
Grep: grep
Make: make
Gawk: awk
Sed: sed
Sh-utils: echo
Textutils: cat