This page was written by Christopher Spry. I am using IRIX 6.2 on an Indy. The most useful source of information about ‘man’ pages is obtained by typing ‘man man’ at the command prompt. I learnt that man pages are read ‘by default’ from the following directories: /usr/share/man, /usr/catman and /usr/man. If there are man pages elsewhere, it is necessary to let your system shell know. The easiest way to do this is to add the paths to these additional programs in the user’s ‘.cshrc’. This is done by setting the ‘MANPATH’ variable. Note that if this is done, the ‘default’ search path is not available, so the ‘default’ paths have to be added to ‘.cshrc’ as well.
As I have additional ‘man’ pages in ‘/usr/local/man’, (a common place for programs to put them) my entry in ‘.cshrc’ is:
Set MANPATH = /usr/share/man:/usr/catman:/usr/man:/usr/local/man
Note that paths are separated by colons.
I will add more directories with 'man pages 'as I find them, but I expect that most programs will load them to /usr/local/man and its subdirectories.
The directories named in MANPATH are searched downwards, so there is no need to enter further subdirectories.
The ‘man’ command can show both ‘formatted’ ‘man’ entries or process unformatted entries ‘on the fly’. ‘man’ files, which are found in directories called ‘cat[1-8nopD]’ are already formatted (their names end in ‘gz or z’) and they can be used directly if they are referred to by the command:
Files in ‘man[1-8nopD]’ directories are unformatted source manual entries and are formatted ‘on the fly’ by ‘man’. If you want to format these files, as they are sometimes not formatted properly 'on the fly', then use the following commands:
Then copy the formatted and compressed ‘mymanpage.z’ to the appropriate /usr/local/man/cat[1-8] directory according to its type. 1-8 refers to these 'man types' and is described further in ‘man man’.
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© Christopher Spry mailto:cspry@cspry.co.uk. This page was last updated on 26 November 2003 10:14:03.