"Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)" <[email protected]> writes:
> As of 7.8, I can no longer 'man ./foo.1' to format a manpage file > in the current directory. I do this constantly while writing man > pages, and its lack now makes writing man pages a PITA. > > Was this removed deliberately? If so, why? Please put this > functionality back. It was very useful. > > --lyndon You could use the -l man option : $ man -l ./foo.1 For the rationale, see: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/906513d7bd69c4f9a7d7f14fcaa96812a5bb3e97 If the -l option is not given to man(1), never interpret "name" command line arguments as absolute or relative path names, not even for arguments that contain a slash and that do not resolve to a page name. While a quirk to sometimes treat arguments as path names has been present and documented in man(1) implementations on Linux for a long time - at least since man-1.5e (July 1998) and man_db-2.3.12 (April 2001) - it was never a good idea for the following reasons: 1. Such a quirk was never in any version of AT&T UNIX nor in BSD and violates the spirit of the POSIX specification of man(1). It was only added to mandoc in 2018 (rev. 1.208), purely for man-db compatibility. 2. There is no good reason for anyone to use the quirk because both mandoc and man-db support the -l option. 3. Documenting the quirk would degrade the quality of the man(1) manual. The canonical place for documenting it would be where the "name" argument is described, i.e. in the very first paragraph, but that would lend the quirk undue weight and complicate the introductory paragraph in an unacceptable manner. 4. The quirk causes minor ambiguity. For example, FreeBSD provides about a dozen pages containing slashes in their names, NetBSD about two dozen, and even OpenBSD provides two such pages. Even the man-db maintainer, Colin Watson, does not like the quirk and considers how to deprecate it. This removal of the quirk was requested by deraadt@. Regards -- Sebastien Marie
