Ted Byers said the following on 12/17/2013 08:53 PM:
What is apropos? I never heard of that before.
Try "man apropos".
Done. OK. I haven't used man in the decades since I finished university. I see the man pages haven't improved much since then. I had assumed that man would have been superceded by something from the twenty first century by now. But maybe my impression of man pages has been a bit jaundiced, as the man pages I endured so long ago, on the departmental machine way back then, were notoriously inaccurate.
I'm sorry you were prejudiced against man pages, but the reality is that this is FOSS. Most programmers consider writing documentation "no fun". That goes for perl as well. Its only firms like IBM. Microsoft and the like where they can charge end users for the produce that they can pay for professional writers to keep bugging the programmers until the writers have enough info to write readable "twenty first century" documentation. You are free to use Windows or some IBM or HP product.
Our sysadmin used us to find the most egregious errors, which he would then correct on our system once we pointed out that the machine didn't do things the way the documentation said to expect it to do them.
ROTHFLMAO! Now I think about it, I've had the same experience with Windows, AIX, some large RAID hardware from a TLA company, HP products all the way down to RS-232 cables, and DG/UX system that claimed it was pure UNIX SVR4.
[ big snip]
Your environment should have a variable MANPATH that lists the various locations manual pages might live. Try echo $MANPATH That should be set by /etc/profile but could be overridden in a number of places including your own .profile or the bash equivalents. See man pages for that.
MANPATH is empty. But, somehow man is finding what it needs.
RTFM
Oh, and try apropos for various terms to help find man pages.
I admit it: I'm very keen on using 'apropos' :-)
Please do read all of "man 1 man".
Done.
Read it again. It answers you other questions elsewhere in this thread.
Oh yes, but the trick, in this case, is to find the manual in order to be able to read it. I guess, the heart of my question was 'where is the manual so I can read it?'
That's what 'apropos' and a proper reading of 'man(1)' is about The latter will tell you how to deal with other formats, how to rebuild the database to include pages and paths (see, for example 'apropos -M') and how to set up /etc/manpath.config and your MANPATH environment variable to make setting permanent. Please do not think everything happens automatically. You do have to set up configuration (and that mean reading the man pages). Simply downloading modules is not enough -- and I would use on of the openSuse repositories before turning to CPAN. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org