Hi, Paco Esteban wrote on Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 06:45:45PM +0200: > On Wed, 24 Jul 2019, Jungle Boogie wrote: >> Turns out I don't know everything and I need to read man pages from >> time-to-time. I'm sure you're like me and also want to consult the >> man pages.
Absolutely. Even though i tend to improve at least one manual page almost every day, i typically consult many different manual pages every day in addition to that, without intending to change them, merely to look something up that i need. >> How do you do it on applications you've installed from source? I almost never install applications from source. When possible, i install packages with pkg_add(1) that were compiled on the official OpenBSD package build infrastructure. When i want to use packages newer than the official ones (which happens rarely because packages are officially updated at least daily) or when i work on updating a package, i build the package myself from the port and install the resulting package. When i want to use software that has not been ported yet, i tend to create a port. That happens rarely because vast amounts of software have already been ported. When temporarily using or testing software that i do not want to port, i typically use the "man -l" option. >> Reading makewhatis.8, I think this is the tool I would use. Yes. >> # makewhatis -D -a /usr/local/share/man Not exactly the question asked by the OP - but using that particular directory for that partivular purpose is an odd choice. In general, regard the whole tree below /usr/local/ as reserved for packages. Do not install anything manually there, always use pkg_add(1) only to change anything below /usr/local/. Admitted, packages do not use /usr/local/share/man/, so this particular directory is unlikely to cause conflicts now or in the future, but it is confusing nonetheless. > As far as I know, that will create a mandoc.db on /usr/local/share/man > That's an index for use with apropos(1) and whatis(1). Correct. >> but this doesn't work: >> $ man 1 nmap >> man: No entry for nmap in section 1 of the manual. Try $ pkg_locate bin/nmap $ doas pkg_add nmap $ man nmap >> What am I doing wrong? > You have to tell man to look on other paths. That can be done setting > the MANPATH env variable. In your case something like: > > MANPATH=/usr/local/share/man: > > Note the ':' at the end. That means that path will be prepended to the > default list of paths to look for man pages. > > Check man(1) for more info. Correct. However, *if* you want to globally install manually installed software to be used by all users of the system, then adding your custom manpath directory globally and system-wide may be even better. For example, create /etc/man.conf similar to this: manpath /usr/share/man manpath /usr/X11R6/man manpath /usr/local/man manpath /usr/local/share/man See man.conf(5) for details. The advantages are: * Users need not remeber setting MANPATH * weekly(8) will keep /usr/local/share/man/mandoc.db up to date. Yours, Ingo
