The man-db manual pager suite

https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db

https://man-db.gitlab.io/man-db/

Please read the man-db manual, included in the manual subdirectory of this distribution. It contains configuration details and other aspects of this manual pager suite that are not duplicated or relevant in this README. Check manual/README for details of the formatters required.

• Read docs/INSTALL.autoconf for generic options to configure. (If you cloned man-db from git, then run ./bootstrap to create this file.)
• Read docs/INSTALL.quick if you know all about man-db.
• Read NEWS.md for visible changes since the last public release.
• Read ChangeLog for details of recent source code changes.
• Read docs/TODO for future plans.

The C source requires an C99 compiler.

Copyright and licensing

Copyright (C) 1990, 1991 John W. Eaton.

Copyright (C) 1994, 1995 Markus Armbruster.

Copyright (C) 1994, 1995 Graeme W. Wilford. (Wilf.)

Copyright (C) 1995 Carl Edman.

Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000 Fabrizio Polacco.

Copyright (C) 2001-2024 Colin Watson.

Copyright (C) 1984, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

man-db is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

man-db is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with man-db; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

In addition, man-db incorporates Gnulib, copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation and others. Note that much of Gnulib is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. This means that, although man-db's own source code is licensed under GPL v2 or later, the work as a whole falls under the terms of the GPL v3 or later. Unless you take special pains to remove the GPL v3 portions, you must therefore follow the terms and conditions of the GPL v3 or later when distributing man-db.

Notice regarding current state of FHS (Linux/?BSD)

As of May 13th, 2001, the last public release of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard proposed the root of the manual page hierarchy as /usr/share and the root of the writable cat hierarchy as /var/cache/man for the purposes of man-to-cat filename translation. As such, the following are defined in ./include/manconfig.h:

#define FHS_CAT_ROOT    "/var/cache/man"        /* required by fsstnd() */
#define FHS_MAN_ROOT    "/usr/share"            /* required by fsstnd() */

For compatibility with the old FSSTND, the following locations are also defined:

#define CAT_ROOT        "/var/catman"           /* required by fsstnd() */
#define MAN_ROOT        "/usr"                  /* required by fsstnd() */

Should these locations change, simply define the paths accordingly and recompile. Other FHS changes relating to man/cat paths will not be compatible with this version of man-db.

Non-generic arguments to configure

To allow the configuration program, configure, to be non-interactive, it can be passed various options to alter the default settings. Generic configure options are discussed in docs/INSTALL.autoconf. The following list of options is extracted from the man-db manual. It is strongly recommended that relevant sections of the manual are read if any of these options are used.

• --enable-cache-owner[=ARG]

  By default, system-wide cache files will be owned by user man. Use this option with an argument to change the cache file owner.

• --disable-cache-owner

  Use this option to leave the ownership of system-wide cache files unconstrained. Users will be allowed to modify them.

• --disable-setuid

  By default, man will be installed as a setuid program to the user that owns the system-wide cache files. Use this option to install man as a non-setuid program instead.

• --enable-mandirs=OS

  By default, man-db supports manual page directories in any of several layouts used by free and proprietary versions of UNIX. However, in certain cases, this can cause man-db to find the wrong page by mistake, especially when the names of some manual pages on the system contain periods. Use this option with an argument of GNU, HPUX, IRIX, Solaris, or BSD (or more than one of these, separated by commas) to support only the layouts typically used on each of those systems. Note that man-db is not currently capable of writing cat pages in the proper BSD layout.

• --with-device=DEVICE

  Use this flag to alter the default output device used by NROFF. DEVICE is passed to NROFF with the -T option. configure will test that NROFF will run with the supplied device argument.

• --with-db=LIBRARY

  configure will look for database interface libraries in the order gdbm, Berkeley DB and finally ndbm and will #define appropriate variables relative to the first one found. To override the built-in order on platforms having a choice of interface library, use this option to specify which library to use.

• --enable-automatic-create

  If this flag is used, man will automatically create index databases for users' private manual page hierarchies.

• --disable-automatic-update

  Normally, man will update entries in index databases if it finds newly installed manual pages (if the --update flag is used) or delete entries if manual pages are removed. This flag suppresses this behaviour.

• --disable-cats

  Normally, man will automatically try to create cat files corresponding to manual files when a manual page is read. This flag suppresses this behaviour.

• --disable-manual

  Don't build or install the man-db manual. This may be useful when cross-compiling, or to reduce the installation size.

Installation

Configure man-db:

• Read docs/INSTALL.autoconf regarding ./configure options.

• Run ./configure --help to see what --enable and --with options may be useful.

• Run ./configure with the appropriate options and environment variable settings.

Browse or edit the following files that were created by the configuration process:

• include/manconfig.h regarding the default section list and other specific definitions.

• lib/compression.c if the default compressor support is inadequate for your requirements. (Usually .Z [compress], .z, .gz [gzip].)

configure will determine your system's ability to use native language support (NLS) message catalogues. You may set the environment variable LINGUAS to limit the set of translations installed. LINGUAS should contain a space-separated list of two-letter language identifiers. To compile man-db with no support for message catalogues, simply pass the --disable-nls option to configure. N.B. This is not related to man's ability to display NLS manual pages, support for which is compiled in by default.

Build man-db:

• Run make to compile man-db with the set of translations chosen when running ./configure.

Sort out the man-db configuration file.

• Run ./src/man -l man/man5/manpath.5 from the root of this distribution to read the man-db configuration file details.

• Edit ./src/man_db.conf to your local requirements.

Install the package.

• (gain superuser privileges for the rest of the steps)

• Run make install to install the utilities and manual pages.

Initialise the index databases for all manpaths marked as global in the man-db configuration file.

• Run mandb (this step is equivalent to running straycats and makewhatis too).

The following steps are optional / dependent on local conventions.

• Acknowledge any warnings emitted by mandb. Bogus manual pages are not included in the database and may be a waste of space. Those pages without correctly formatted "whatis" lines are included, but will have a whatis entry of "(unknown)"

• cd tools and run mkcatdirs -t to see if you have all of the required cat directories. mkcatdirs without an option will display a usage message.

• cd tools and run checkman with an argument of colon-separated manual page hierarchies to cross check for duplicated manual pages. If no argument is given, your default $MANPATH will be used.

  The output of checkman may be piped into a file and used as an argument to rm; the "is newer than" messages are directed to standard error. E.g. checkman > dups

  If you are confident that the duplicates found are indeed duplicates, you can back them up and delete them to save space.

  At this point, running checkman again may yield further duplicates that were ignored the first time.

• Run catman with appropriate options to create any/all cat files that you would like pre-formatted.

Multiple build directories

It is possible to build man-db in a directory other than the directory containing this file (and all of the program sources). This is particularly useful if compiling on multiple architectures or testing various configuration options as only a single copy of the sources is required.

To enable this support, simply change directory to where you would like to build the package and run the configure program in this directory from there. Further information about this support can be found in the generic install document docs/INSTALL.autoconf.

Makefile targets and variables

The standard GNU Makefile targets: all, install, uninstall, mostlyclean, clean, distclean, realclean and TAGS are available in every Makefile- supported directory. In addition, the master Makefile has the dist target to create a compressed and tarred distribution file.

During the configuration process, configure sets the installation variables, prefix and exec_prefix. These are then used to form other variables such as bindir and sysconfdir. To change any of these or other standard GNU install variables dynamically, issue the make command with variable expressions as arguments, eg. make prefix=/usr/local/packages

N.B. If prefix=/usr (either statically or dynamically), then sysconfdir=/etc instead of the usual $(prefix)/etc. To force sysconfdir to be /usr/etc, set it on the make command line.

Default preprocessors

man-db uses a manual page directed preprocessor system, that is, each manual page may request preprocessing by a selection of preprocessors. Some systems' manual pages do not come with this information built in. In such circumstances, it is advisable to set a default list of preprocessors that each manual page should be passed through, so that those requiring special processing are readable. To achieve this, set DEFAULT_MANROFFSEQ (found in include/manconfig.h) to the appropriate preprocessor string, after running configure, but prior to compilation. This is not necessary for the following systems whose default preprocessing requirements are known.

• Known not to require DEFAULT_MANROFFSEQ:

  Linux, SunOS

• Known to require #define DEFAULT_MANROFFSEQ "t":

  Ultrix

• Known to require #define DEFAULT_MANROFFSEQ "te":

  HP-UX, OSF/1

If unsure of the default preprocessors required by a system, the standard system's man(1) manual page may provide an answer.

Contacting the maintainer

The current maintainer of man-db is Colin Watson cjwatson@debian.org. Please feel free to contact me with any queries or problems you may have. You can report bugs here:

https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues

Bugs from before the migration to GitLab may be found here:

https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db