[Techtalk] edit manpath

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 03:05:02PM +0000 or thereabouts, Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Sunday 11 August 2002 08:49 pm, you wrote:
> > Oh. Me and my too hasty fingers. I am not sure if this will work with troff
> > files. What I'll write below works definately for the ?standard foo.8.bz2
> > type man pages. I've made a few assumptions too, namely that your man
> > operates similar to mine (ie youre not using a bsd or powerpc type setup)
> > and that you dont have any MANPATH MANSECT variables set in your shell.
> 
> Thanks Hamster, I'll give it a go. Troff is a multiple-use format that 
> programs 
> like 'man' format on the fly. Most man pages are stored compressed, which 
> doesn't tell the real file format.
> 
> Thanks again, I'll try it and see what happens.

If it doesn't work, I am reminded of a discovery I made on another
occasion that the man program was mentioned on Linuxchix:

There are two different packages which perform the same function.
You invoke both of them by 'man'; and 'man --version' will give
you very different version-numbering styles.

One has version numbers along the lines of man-1.5j and is shipped
by Red Hat (and others?).

One has version numbers along the lines of 2.3.20 and is shipped
by Debian (and others?): it's properly called man-db. 

And their config files differ enough to confuse. There was a techtalk
thread in January 2000 which has more on this. The subject line is
'man, more or less?' 

I didn't know that Mandrake stores them all as .bz2 files. Red Hat
is still using .gz files.

Telsa