Trouble using the "man" subsystem

[Chris Pressey]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2003 13:52:10 -0500
Forrest Aldrich <forrie at forrie.com> wrote:

> 
> I posted about this a while ago.
> 
> For some time, I've had a broken manpage system on my FreeBSB 
> box.  Currently, it's at FreeBSD-4.9.
> 
> The symptoms are:  sometimes I get an error about not being able to
> locate tmac for tty-char.  Though I can find that in
> /usr/local/share/groff, etc.   Most times, I will do "man command" and
> the prompt just returns.  Nothing, nada.
> 
> I'm absolutely puzzled, because a reinstall (makeworld/buildworld)
> does NOT resolve the problem.    I cannot see there to be any odd
> environment variables, however this suggests there may be a
> configuration issue "somewhere".    I'm out of ideas, and wonder if
> anyone out there has suggestions about where to look, how to fix this.

Well, you can take a look at $MANPATH, to start.  Then see if the
command is anywhere in there, e.g. if you are looking for foo in section
2 of the manual, it's likely stored as /usr/share/man/man2/foo.2.gz , or
/usr/local/man/man2/foo.2.gz , etc.

-Chris