Bug 125 – man is broken

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description David Holm 2002-01-10 15:56:30 UTC]

Hi,
my man stopped working. I don't know which package broke it... Now all I get is:
bash-2.05a$ man write
sh: -c: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `)'
sh: -c: line 1: `(cd /usr/man && (echo ".pl 1100i"; gzip -c -d
'/usr/man/man1/write.1.gz'; echo; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | nroff -mandoc | )'
Error executing formatting or display command.
System command (cd /usr/man && (echo ".pl 1100i"; gzip -c -d
'/usr/man/man1/write.1.gz'; echo; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | nroff -mandoc | )
exited with status 2.
No manual entry for write

[Comment 1 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) 2002-01-11 12:02:45 UTC]

David, could you do a bit more research?  What packages did you merge recently?
 We really need more information to track down this bug.

[Comment 2 Andreas 2002-01-11 16:33:25 UTC]

Looks to me that you are missing nroff

[Comment 3 Lars S. Jensen 2002-01-20 06:50:08 UTC]

Version: sys-apps/man-1.5i-r1 
after 'nroff -mandoc | ' should there be a '/usr/bin/less -is'.

It is missing the default expantion of MANPAGER:

       MANPAGER
              If  MANPAGER  is set, its value is used as the name
              of the program to use to display the man page.   If
              not,  then  PAGER  is  used.  If  that has no value
              either, /usr/bin/less -is is used.

Setting "export MANPAGER='/usr/bin/less -is'" and it works!

[Comment 4 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) 2002-01-20 10:04:40 UTC]

OK.  Was MANAPAGER set in your shell before?  How about PAGER? I'd like to track
this down.

[Comment 5 Aaron Malone 2002-01-21 18:04:59 UTC]

It looks like PAGER needs to be set in /etc/man.conf.  If neither PAGER nor
MANPAGER are set in the user's environment, man falls back onto the PAGER
setting in /etc/man.conf.  Changing (line 83 on my system):

PAGER

to

PAGER        /usr/bin/less -is

fixes the problem.

[Comment 6 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) 2002-01-25 23:28:24 UTC]

fixed on cvs