/usr/share/man - Rules for showing/gernerating manual pages

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2003-03-26 12:23, parv <parv_fm at emailgroups.net> wrote:
>in message <20030325233934.GD2387 at gothmog.gr>,
>wrote Giorgos Keramidas thusly...
>> But you can safely delete (or simply move away) the existing
>> /usr/share directory right before `make installworld'...
>>
>> 	# cd /usr
>> 	# mv share share.old
>> 	# mtree -deU < /etc/mtree/BSD.usr.dist
>>
>> and then run `make installworld' in /usr/src.  After installworld
>> finishes successfully, you can delete share.old.
>
> Giorgos, i would that the next time; thanks.
>
> Having said that, i was hoping for something like the following (for
> FreeBSD)...
>
>   http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2d543m%24n30%40mail.boku.ac.at

Ah, yes.  Now I see that I misread the original post.

Well, man(1) in FreeBSD is a slightly modified version of GNU man.
The basic idea of locating a manpage and convnerting it to a
preformatted ``cat page'' remains the same.  The details of the
conversion can always be found in /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/man/man/man.c
(look at the definition of the glob_for_filename() and try_section()
functions in this file).

It's pretty much the same as the post you quoted above.  Some of the
information that you want to find out is actually part of the output
of this command:

	$ man -d ls 2>&1 | more

I hope this time, I'm not very off-topic :)

- Giorgos