On 13-12-17 08:18 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Ted Byers said the following on 12/17/2013 06:42 PM:
On 13-12-17 06:30 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Ted Byers said the following on 12/17/2013 06:02 PM:
[...] Can anyone tell me where it is?
Does this command return anything?
$ apropos perl
Hi Anton,
Thanks for this.
:-)
Thanks again.
Yes. I get basically a list of perl modules that have been installed.
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 I had assumed that man would have been superceded by something from the twenty first century by now.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. 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. But to be fair and honest, he was a master at optimizing the OS (by tweaking the code and rebuilding parts of it), I couldn't tell you whether the problems were original to the the servers or introduced by his optimizations. And to be fair to him, his optimizations were necessary in order to a) prolong the useful life of the machine, as demand grew, and b) make the machines bear a load they would not have otherwise borne. It seemed to me, in some respects, to be penny wise and pound foolish, as the cost of his time optimizing the machines was substantially greater than the difference in cost between what the department bought and what would have actually easily borne the load they put on it OTB. [ 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.
Oh, and try apropos for various terms to help find man pages. As you can see in /etc/profile, a program names 'manpath' is used to determine the possible paths. This in turn, as "man 1 manpath" will tell you, relies on a config file, /etc/manpath.config, whose format you can read about using "man 5 manpath". This tried to determine what you have installed and where the commonly found man pages might live. It is possible that you might need to update this, but I'd take advice from others before doing so.
Please do read all of "man 1 man".
Done.
It is great that apropos lists all these perl modules, but what is the next step to actually be able to browse the documentation?
Can you see now why the Whitebeards keep saying to RTFM ?
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?' Thanks Ted -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org