Hello Helge, Tobias, On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 06:07:57AM +0000, Helge Kreutzmann wrote: > Hello Tobias, > if you look at mansect(1), the example given does not work in Debian. > I reported this upstream and got the following reply: > > > The issue is that Debian compresses manual pages. Please consider > > changing the policy to not compress manual pages. The storage savings > > are irrelevant in this age. > > Could you consider this?
Thanks! Indeed, compressed manual pages are a pain to work with. You can't use regular Unix tools to work with them. With uncompressed manual pages, You can go to /usr/share/man, and run a pipe of programs to do a complex search. With tools like zgrep(1) and zcat(1), you can do some stuff, but not everything. A couple of years ago, I did some measurements, which should be relevant now: <https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/[email protected]/T/#m272e6ee8939d0836999dd8bb28f2e0e94f48dfc7> I'll paste some of it: $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/gz__1 -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z=.gz GZIPFLAGS=-1 | wc -l 2571 $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/gz__9 -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z=.gz GZIPFLAGS=-9 | wc -l 2571 $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/man__ -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z= | wc -l 2571 $ du -sh /opt/local/man/* 5.7M /opt/local/man/gz__1 5.5M /opt/local/man/gz__9 5.5M /opt/local/man/gz___ 9.4M /opt/local/man/man__ $ export MANPATH=/opt/local/man/gz__1/share/man $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l | xargs printf '%s; '" 17; 0.21 $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | while read f; do gzip -d - <\$f | grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE >/dev/null && echo \$f; done | wc -l | xargs printf '%s; '" 17; 1.16 $ export MANPATH=/opt/local/man/gz__9/share/man $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l | xargs printf '%s; '" 17; 0.20 $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | while read f; do gzip -d - <\$f | grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE >/dev/null && echo \$f; done | wc -l | xargs printf '%s; '" 17; 1.17 $ export MANPATH=/opt/local/man/man__/share/man $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "man -Kaw RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l | xargs printf '%s; '" 17; 0.55 $ /bin/time -f %e dash -c "find $MANPATH -type f | xargs -P0 grep -l RLIMIT_NOFILE | wc -l | xargs printf '%s; '" 17; 0.01 As you can see, running a pipeline directly in $MANPATH is orders of magnitude faster with uncompressed pages. And doing global apropos is still in the same order of magnitude, even if a bit slower (I suspect it is actually running zgrep(1) on uncompressed pages, so it probably could be faster). Also, if man-db's man(1) could eventually remove the optimizations done for gzip, we'd get a much simpler (safer) librarian program suite. > Less preferred would be a Debian patch to the man pages, stating what > a Debian user would have to do to achieve the purpose of mansect(1). Indeed. Have a lovely day! Alex -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>
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