Manual-Page Installation
Historically, the man
command expected to find manual pages in subdirectories of a search path
defined by the environment variable MANPATH, typically
something like /usr/man:/usr/local/man.
Some recent man versions simply
assume that each directory in the program search path, PATH, can be suffixed with the string /../man to identify a companion manual-page
directory, eliminating the need for MANPATH.
In each manual-page directory, it is common to find pairs of
subdirectories prefixed man and
cat and suffixed with the section
number. Within each subdirectory, filenames are also suffixed by the
section number. Thus, /usr/man/man1/ls.1 is the troff file that documents the ls command, and /usr/man/cat1/ls.1 holds nroff's formatted output. man use the latter, when it exists, to avoid
rerunning the formatter unnecessarily.
While some vendors have since adopted quite different organization
of the manual-page trees, their man
implementations still recognize the historical practice. Thus,
installation of most GNU software puts executables in $prefix/bin and manual pages in $prefix/man/man1, where prefix defaults to /usr/local, and that seems to work nicely
everywhere.
System managers normally arrange to run catman or makewhatis at regular intervals to update a
file containing the one-line descriptions from the manual-page NAME sections. That file is used by the
apropos, man -k, and whatis commands to provide a simple index of manual pages. If that doesn't turn up what ...
Get Classic Shell Scripting now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
