Local man pages

[David B Funk]

In article <C3ADp...@bcstec.ca.boeing.com> jo...@bcstec.ca.boeing.com (Josh Bink) writes:
>I am attempting to set up local man pages on our Apollo network and
>was wondering how others have handled it.
>
>We run under sysv. The man pages for system V are set up as follows:
>Note: Most of the information that follows is what I assume, and we
> all know what that means.
>
>
>The man page on man says files are located in /usr/catman/?_man/man[1-8]/*
>I first attempted to create a directory l_man (for local man pages) under
>/usr/catman, but man appears to only check a_man, p_man, and u_man.

True, this appears to be a compiled in limitation.

>Typing ``man -p'' lists the order that man page directories are searched.
>It lists the suffixes 1-7 and the letter a. It appears that mana is the
>only directory that will be searched other than man1-man7. i.e. mana under
>/usr/catman/p_man. Therefore, the link mann -> ../../../../usr/new/mann
>located under /usr/catman/u_man will not be searched because it has a
>suffix of 'n'.

The 'man' program as a compiled in list of default directories that it will
search thru. However this -can- be overridden/controlled via the 'mantable'
file. The file "/usr/catman/mantable" will control the directory search list,
if it exists, else man will fall back to its compiled in table. This table is
what you see with the 'man -p' command.
As root, try the following experiment:

# umask 033
# man -p > /usr/catman/mantable
# echo 'n n' >> /usr/catman/mantable
# man vmh

Now, all of a sudden, 'man' can find all that stuff in the 'mann' directory
(such as "vmh.n" ;)
"mantable" is just a text file, go edit it with your favorite editor and all
all the goodies that you want. If you've created it as I suggest, it will even
start out with comments that discribe its format/usage.

PS: For you BSD-ites, 'mantable' works the same way, just make the appropriate
path substitution ('/usr/man/mantable' ;).