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man-db/NEWS.md
Daniel Baumann 1fa764a8d3
Adding upstream version 2.13.1. 
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
2025-06-21 08:13:55 +02:00

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man-db 2.13.1 (2 May 2025)

Fixes:

  • Fix various minor formatting issues in manual pages.
  • Tolerate additional spaces in preprocessor strings.
  • Fix check for generated source files in out-of-tree builds.
  • Fix building with the musl C library.

Improvements:

  • Recognize another Ukrainian translation of the NAME section.
  • Increase the maximum size of the NAME section from 8192 to 16384 bytes.

man-db 2.13.0 (29 August 2024)

Compatibility notes:

  • Drop support for versions of groff before 1.21 (released on 2010-12-31).

Fixes:

  • Fix man-suffixed-extension test failure when not using the GNU hierarchy organization.
  • Fix -Wmissing-variable-declarations warnings with GCC 14.
  • Fix -Wflex-array-member-not-at-end warning with GCC 14.

Improvements:

  • Upgrade to Gnulib stable-202407.
  • Support running the test suite against an installed package; this is useful for systems such as Debian's autopkgtest framework.

man-db 2.12.1 (5 April 2024)

Fixes:

  • Fix excessive cleanup of /var/cache/man by systemd-tmpfiles.

Improvements:

  • man matches the display width more accurately to the configured width.
  • Upgrade to Gnulib stable-202401.
  • Mention groff's pdf device in man(1).
  • Speed up seccomp filter slightly.
  • Document how to format pages using italic rather than underlined text.

Compatibility notes:

  • Remove the obsolete chconfig tool for converting man-db configuration files to the FHS. This transition took place almost 25 years ago (at least in Debian), so it's not worth keeping it around now.

man-db 2.12.0 (23 September 2023)

Fixes:

  • Fix some manual page portability issues with groff 1.23.0.
  • Fix test failures when a working iconv is not available.
  • Ensure that timestamps read from the database can go past the year 2038, even on systems where this is not the default.
  • Fix manpath not parsing PATH entries with trailing slash correctly for guessing MANPATH entries.
  • More accurately document the behaviour of passing file names as arguments to man without the -l/--local-file option.
  • Avoid duplicate cleanup of old cat pages by both man-db.service and systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service.

Improvements:

  • Update system call lists in seccomp sandbox from systemd.
  • Upgrade to Gnulib stable-202307.
  • Work around the Firebuild accelerator in seccomp sandbox: if this is in use then we need to allow some socket-related system calls.
  • man -K now deduplicates search results that point to the same page.
  • Warn if mandb drops to --user-db mode due to running as the wrong user.
  • Change section title recommendations in man(1) to mention STANDARDS rather than CONFORMING TO, in line with man-pages(7).
  • Add a STANDARDS section to man(1) itself.
  • Document that man -K may suffer from false negatives as well as false positives.
  • Take advantage of newer groff facilities to implement man --no-hyphenation and man --no-justification, if available.
  • man -f and man -k now pass any -r/--regex or -w/--wildcard options on to whatis and apropos respectively.
  • Always pass a line length to nroff, even if we believe that it matches the default.
  • Allow disabling groff warnings via man --warnings, by prefixing a warning name with !.

man-db 2.11.2 (8 January 2023)

Fixes:

  • Fix compile and test failures when troff is not groff.
  • Fix segfault in typical uses of man when nroff is not installed.
  • Fix crash in mandb when processing stray cats.

Improvements:

  • Check for stray cats even if no manual pages in a given manpath were changed.

man-db 2.11.1 (15 November 2022)

Build:

Fixes:

  • SECURITY: Replace $ characters in page names with ? when constructing less prompts.
  • Silence error message when processing an empty manual page hierarchy with a nonexistent cache directory.
  • man(1) now sorts whatis references below real pages, even if the whatis references are from a section with higher priority.

Improvements:

  • Add section 3type to the default section list just after 2. This is used by the Linux man-pages package.
  • Recognize more Hungarian translations of the NAME section.

man-db 2.11.0 (15 October 2022)

Fixes:

  • mandb now correctly records filters in the database if it uses cached whatis information.
  • Upgrade Gnulib, fixing syntax error on glibc systems with GCC 11.
  • The CATWIDTH configuration file directive now overrides MINCATWIDTH and MAXCATWIDTH.
  • Database entries for links were often incorrectly stored as if they were entries for the ultimate source of the page. They are now stored with the correct type.
  • Store links in the database using the section and extension of the link rather than of the ultimate source file.
  • Consider pages for adding to the database even if they seem to already exist; this performance optimization is no longer needed due to caching, and it produced inconsistent results in some unusual cases.
  • man now runs any required preprocessors in the same order that groff does, rather than trusting the order of filters in a page's preprocessor string.
  • Fix building on MinGW. (I haven't been able to test this; help from MinGW experts would be welcome.)

Improvements:

  • Add more recognized case variants for localized versions of the NAME section.
  • Maintain multi keys in sorted order, improving database reproducibility.
  • Pick a more consistent name for the target of a whatis entry in the database.
  • Extend rules for when to replace one database entry with another, producing more stable behaviour.
  • Fully reorganize databases after writing them, allowing the reproduction of bitwise-identical databases regardless of scan order (at least with GDBM).

man-db 2.10.2 (17 March 2022)

Build:

  • Regenerating man-db's build system now explicitly requires Automake >= 1.14. (This was already the case since at least man-db 2.10.0, but was previously undocumented.)

Fixes:

  • Make man -H sleep for a few seconds after starting the browser, since it may background itself before loading files (Dr. Werner Fink).
  • If an override directory is configured using --with-override-dir, it is now applied more consistently when building the manpath, and whether a page was found in an override directory is considered when sorting candidates for display (Mihail Konev).

Improvements:

  • Make the man-db manual build reproducible.
  • Add some hardening options to the systemd service.
  • configure now has a --with-snapdir option, for use on systems where snapd is configured to use a directory other than /snap.

man-db 2.10.1 (10 February 2022)

Fixes:

  • Fix occasional mandb-symlink-target-timestamp test failure.
  • Fix inadvertent reliance on a GCC extension that caused build failures with Clang.
  • Fix building without iconv.
  • Fix building on Cygwin.

man-db 2.10.0 (4 February 2022)

Build:

Fixes:

  • Manpath deduplication no longer mishandles the case where another entry in the manpath is a suffix of a candidate path to append.
  • Fix potential crash in path searching if getcwd fails for reasons other than running out of memory.
  • Fix crash in globbing test tool if run with no non-option arguments.
  • lexgrog now produces output in the user's locale.
  • Downgrade "malformed .lf request" warning to a debug message and rephrase it somewhat, since .lf requests can use *roff arithmetic expressions and we can't reasonably parse those.
  • Avoid modifying the database without changing its mtime, which had been possible since 2.7.0 if mandb's purge phase found work to do but the main phase didn't, and which confused some backup systems into reporting possible filesystem corruption.
  • man no longer inadvertently modifies the MANSECT environment variable before passing it on to its subprocesses.
  • mandb now stores the mtime of link targets as the mtime of their corresponding database entries, rather than sometimes storing the mtime of the link instead.
  • Since man-db 2.4.2, man has behaved as if the -l option was given if a manual page argument contains a slash. Since man-db 2.5.6, this has interacted slightly poorly with the subpage feature, emitting spurious error messages if given multiple manual page arguments some of which include a slash. man no longer emits spurious error messages in this case.

Improvements:

  • Reduce overhead of MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP=1 compared to building without libseccomp.
  • Document MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP and PIPELINE_DEBUG environment variables in man(1).
  • Add man-pages(7) reference to man(1).
  • Recognize Arabic and Persian translations of the NAME section.
  • Delay the systemd timer using RandomizedDelaySec, so that multiple containers/VMs on the same host are less prone to running mandb all at the same time.
  • Significantly improve mandb(8) and man -K performance in the common case where pages are of moderate size and compressed using zlib: mandb -c goes from 344 seconds to 10 seconds on a test system.

man-db 2.9.4 (8 February 2021)

Improvements:

  • Recognise Romanian translations of the NAME section.
  • Treat \[en] (etc.) as another synonym for \- in NAME sections, alongside the existing \(en (etc.).

Fixes:

  • Make the seccomp sandbox work better with libcs such as musl (S. Gilles).
  • Make the seccomp sandbox allow clock_gettime64 as well as clock_gettime (S. Gilles).

man-db 2.9.3 (22 June 2020)

Fixes:

  • Fix manual page translation infrastructure to compare po4a versions with more than two components correctly.
  • Avoid incorrect markup in man(1) with po4a >= 0.58.

man-db 2.9.2 (1 June 2020)

Fixes:

  • Fix man -X75-12 and man -X100-12 to set the document font size (using -rS12) as well as the device (using -TX75-12 or -TX100-12).
  • Fix incompatibility of man -X and friends with the seccomp sandbox.

Improvements:

  • Add a bug tracker link to man-db's own manual pages.
  • Add support for zstd-compressed manual pages, thanks to Bernhard Rosenkränzer.

man-db 2.9.1 (25 February 2020)

Improvements:

  • Drop fdutimens patch for GNU/Hurd; the bug it was working around was fixed in glibc 2.28.
  • Add MANDB_MAP entry mapping /snap/man to /var/cache/man/snap.

man-db 2.9.0 (23 October 2019)

Fixes:

  • man --recode and manconv now adjust encoding declarations on the first line of their input to refer to the new encoding.
  • Fix comparison of candidate manual pages to correctly handle the case where the language elements are the same and match the locale, but the territory elements differ.

Improvements:

  • Many typographical improvements to man-db's own manual pages, largely thanks to Bjarni Ingi Gislason.
  • Rewrite parts of man(1) to make it a more accessible introduction.
  • If run with no arguments or only a section, man now suggests running man man.
  • man now understands the <page>(<section>) form on its command line, so for example man 'chmod(2)' is now the same as man 2 chmod. While this requires more quoting, it may also be more convenient when copying and pasting cross-references to manual pages.
  • manconv now guesses the input encoding based on the file name if it is not explicitly specified.
  • There is a new man-recode program. It fulfils a purpose similar to man --recode, but has an interface designed for bulk conversion and so can be much faster when used on a large number of pages.

Compatibility notes:

  • Remove the ability to undefine COMP_SRC at build-time to disable reading compressed manual pages. This was always only a micro-optimisation, and it wasn't worth the extra code complexity. You can still configure without any compressors (either by not having them available at build time, or by configuring with --with-gzip= etc.) to achieve much the same practical effect, although the test suite still requires at least gunzip.

man-db 2.8.7 (26 August 2019)

Fixes:

  • Further workarounds for ESET File Security: allow sendmsg when it is in use.
  • The seccomp sandbox now causes disallowed system calls to return EPERM rather than raising SIGSYS, in the hope of being less disruptive to preload hacks.
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow getrandom, used by Hardened Malloc.
  • man no longer saves cat pages if --no-hyphenation or --no-justification is used.
  • Move decompression code out of libman. This should really fix a link failure using the Darwin linker (unsuccessfully attempted in 2.8.6), and possibly on other platforms too.
  • Pass the database file name around in function parameters, rather than storing it in a global variable with an unresolved symbol from libmandb. Like the previous item, this fixes a link failure using the Darwin linker, and possibly on other platforms too.
  • Return database entries in sorted order when using NDBM. (This is based on a similar fix to the GDBM backend in man-db 2.4.2.)

Improvements:

  • Recognise Esperanto, Tamil, and Ukrainian translations of the NAME section.

man-db 2.8.6.1 (5 August 2019)

Fixes:

  • Fix missing memory copies in ult_src that caused segfaults in mandb.

man-db 2.8.6 (3 August 2019)

Fixes:

  • If more than one of ../man, man, ../share/man, and share/man exist relative to a directory on $PATH, then all of them are now added to the automatically-determined manpath; previously, only the first was considered.
  • Remove arbitrary limit on manpath size.
  • The systemd database maintenance service now runs mandb with the --quiet option, avoiding excess log messages.
  • Default to --without-systemdsystemunitdir and --without-systemdtmpfilesdir on non-Linux systems.
  • Fix failure to link libman using the Darwin linker.
  • apropos -w now works when given a non-lower-case pattern.

Improvements:

  • Convert most list and hash table code to Gnulib's container types: these are more flexible and normally more concise than home-grown equivalents.
  • There is a new configure option --disable-manual, which causes the man-db manual not to be built or installed.

man-db 2.8.5 (5 January 2019)

Build:

  • Building man-db now requires Autoconf >= 2.63 and Automake >= 1.11.2.

Fixes:

  • Fix build with Berkeley DB.
  • Fail to configure if flex is needed but missing.
  • Fix the comment in the first line of the configuration file in the case where configure was not given a --with-config-file option.
  • Fix several resource and memory leaks.
  • Fix handling of \- in the right-hand side of a NAME section.
  • Work around Microsoft's proprietary "System Center Endpoint Protection" antivirus program in the seccomp sandbox.

Improvements:

  • Ship a systemd timer to perform daily database maintenance.
  • Allow disabling the installation of the systemd tmpfiles snippet and the systemd timer by configuring with --with-systemdtmpfilesdir=no and --with-systemdsystemunitdir=no respectively.

man-db 2.8.4 (27 July 2018)

Fixes:

  • Rely on decompressors reading from their standard input rather than redundantly passing them the input file on their command line. This works better with downstream AppArmor confinement of decompressors.
  • Fix invalid syntax in tmpfiles.d/man-db.conf when configured with --disable-cache-owner.
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow sched_getaffinity, sometimes used by xz.
  • Check for mandb_nfmt and mandb_tfmt in the manual page hierarchy as documented, not in the current directory. This was broken by the working-directory-handling changes in 2.8.3. Note that this change means that man -l will never use an external formatter (which was never documented behaviour and was surely a bad idea).
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow some shared memory operations across the board rather than just when ESET File Security is in use; the Astrill VPN seems to require something similar, and there are doubtless other such preload hacks.
  • Some versions of ESET File Security call msgget and msgsnd; if this program is in use, then allow those.

man-db 2.8.3 (5 April 2018)

Fixes:

  • Make seccomp sandbox allow madvise, since that's used by lbzip2.
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow kill and tgkill outright, since groff uses kill to pass on signals to its child processes.
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow sibling architectures on x86/x86_64/x32, since people sometimes mix and match architectures there for performance reasons.
  • Fix version check in locale macro loading to tolerate groff release candidates.
  • man now only changes working directory in child processes, so never fails due to being unable to change back to its original working directory.
  • accessdb, apropos, and lexgrog no longer emit spurious gettext headers in their --help output when localised.

man-db 2.8.2 (28 February 2018)

Fixes:

  • Make seccomp sandbox allow kill and tgkill when the signal is directed at the current process or one of its threads; this is needed by xz.
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow ioctl(fd, TIOCGWINSZ), since that's used by musl.
  • Work around the proprietary "ESET File Security" antivirus program in seccomp sandbox: if this is in use then we need to allow some socket-related system calls.
  • Work around the snoopy execve() wrapper and logger in seccomp sandbox: if this is in use then we need to allow some socket-related system calls.
  • Interpret EFAULT from seccomp_load as meaning that seccomp is unavailable, since this can be returned by some versions of qemu-user.

man-db 2.8.1 (9 February 2018)

Fixes:

  • Fix seccomp sandbox build on Linux/POWER.
  • Fix manconv execution under seccomp when man is installed setuid.
  • Make seccomp sandbox allow mremap (used by iconv, for example).

Improvements:

  • configure now has a --without-libseccomp option to disable the use of seccomp even if the library is available.

man-db 2.8.0 (4 February 2018)

Fixes:

  • Fix locale macro loading for Chinese to load the macro file corresponding to just the language part of the user's locale.
  • Honour --enable-cache-owner in generated systemd tmpfiles snippet rather than hardcoding man.
  • If man adds prefixes to a page to handle such things as disabling hyphenation, then take account of those when looking for a preprocessor line at the start of the page.
  • Fix a segfault in man -D --help.

Improvements:

  • Treat \(en as another synonym for \- in NAME sections.

  • Confine most subprocesses that handle untrusted data using seccomp. This mainly deals with subprocesses that perform encoding conversions, (de)compressors, groff programs, and a few other odds and ends. groff programs use a slightly more permissive filter since they need to create temporary files, so additional path-based confinement (e.g. using AppArmor) is still useful.

    If this goes wrong, then MAN_DISABLE_SECCOMP=1 can be set in the environment to disable it, but please report any such problem as a bug.

  • man now falls back to cat if the compile-time default pager is not executable.

man-db 2.7.6.1 (12 December 2016)

Fixes:

  • Don't chmod CACHEDIR.TAG if it doesn't exist.
  • Correct installation of Swedish manual pages.

man-db 2.7.6 (11 December 2016)

Fixes:

  • Fix build warnings with Perl 5.22.

  • Document that man -K searches page source, not rendered text.

  • Fix a long-standing bug in man-db's internal cleanup stack mechanism: if a cleanup function was pushed unexpectedly between a push/pop pair, then popping the stack would remove the wrong cleanup function and chaos could ensue. Avoid this by being more precise about which cleanup function should be popped.

  • SECURITY: Eliminate dangerous setgid-root directories. In the default configuration, cache files and directories are now owned by man:man rather than man:root; man and mandb are now setgid man as well as setuid man (except in the --disable-setuid case). This is a much simpler and safer solution to the original problem that caused my predecessor to make directories setgid root, and doesn't introduce any interesting new privilege since the man group's only real purpose is to be the man user's primary group and nothing in cache directories is group-writeable.

    Maintainers of distribution packages should take care to review their installation rules in light of this change.

    As far as I know this has no CVE ID, but it is described here.

  • Fix manual page translation infrastructure to render tables correctly with po4a 0.47.

Improvements:

  • man now understands the <page>.<section> form on its command line, so for example man chmod.2 is now the same as man 2 chmod. (Contributed by Mihail Konev.)
  • The owner of cache files is now configured separately from whether man and mandb are installed setuid, using the --enable-cache-owner[=USER] option.

man-db 2.7.5 (6 November 2015)

Fixes:

  • Adjust line number when inserting extra roff input.
  • Disable roff input insertion with --recode.
  • Build text manual with LC_ALL=C, to help reproducible builds.

man-db 2.7.4 (8 October 2015)

Fixes:

  • Fix crash when eliminating manpath duplicates if canonicalising a manpath entry fails.
  • Fix a build system bug that sometimes caused substitutions in manual pages to be left unexpanded.
  • man exits with status 3 rather than 0 if its formatting command exits non-zero, even if its display command exits zero.
  • man honours MANWIDTH in conjunction with the -Z option, to make it easier to diagnose warnings in manual pages.

man-db 2.7.3 (9 September 2015)

Fixes:

  • Tools that consider the terminal line length now try the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl on /dev/tty as well as standard input/output.
  • mandb does a better job of coping with index files having incorrect ownership.
  • Squeeze blank lines internally rather than relying on the pager supporting the -s option.
  • Fix use-after-free in ult_src.
  • Fix crash when running from a missing and unreadable current directory, such as an orphaned subdirectory of /proc.
  • Restore the ability to use man -a noninteractively.

man-db 2.7.2 (16 August 2015)

Fixes:

  • man -k and man -f now pass any provided -l option through to the underlying apropos/whatis programs.
  • apropos and whatis no longer truncate names if long output was requested.
  • The database handle is no longer stored in a global variable, fixing a class of possible double-close bugs.

man-db 2.7.1 (7 November 2014)

Fixes:

  • Various portability fixes for Solaris, contributed by Peter Bray.
  • man now runs correctly when its current working directory has been deleted. (As a result of this fix, man-db now requires libpipeline >= 1.4.0.)
  • man -a sends its prompts to /dev/tty rather than to stderr, and likewise reads replies from /dev/tty rather than from stdin.

man-db 2.7.0.2 (28 September 2014)

Fixes:

  • Be more careful to avoid using or double-closing closed database handles. Fixes test suite failures on some systems.
  • Patch the fdutimens function imported from Gnulib to work around a libc bug in GNU/Hurd.

man-db 2.7.0.1 (24 September 2014)

Fixes:

  • Fix test suite in the case where the system supports high-precision timestamps but the file system containing the build directory does not.

man-db 2.7.0 (22 September 2014)

Upgrading from previous versions:

  • For the first time since version 2.4.0, the database format has changed slightly, so you will need to run mandb --create after installing the new version to rebuild your databases from scratch. (Distribution packages should do this automatically for system databases.)

Fixes:

  • lexgrog now filters terminal escape sequences out of cat pages before trying to parse them.
  • Tools that consider the terminal line length now prioritise the COLUMNS environment variable above the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl.
  • Manpath elements are no longer canonicalised before being inserted into the search path; this caused the use of incorrect catpaths in some cases. This was broken by the LANGUAGE-handling fixes in 2.5.4.

Improvements:

  • Ship a systemd tmpfiles snippet to clean up old cat files after a week.
  • The modification time of manual databases is now simply stored in the mtime of the database files themselves, rather than using a special row. This makes databases reproducible between otherwise-identical installations, as long as the underlying database has predictable behaviour. As a bonus, man-db now uses high-precision timestamps to determine whether it needs to update databases.
  • Timestamps of manual pages are also now stored in the database with high precision and compared accordingly.
  • Files are now ordered by first physical extent before reading them, for substantial performance improvements in operations such as mandb and man -K.
  • man -H shows a better error message if no browser is configured.
  • zsoelim is now installed in $pkglibexecdir, to avoid clashes with other packages.

man-db 2.6.7.1 (10 April 2014)

Fixes:

  • Remove test suite dependency on realpath(1).

man-db 2.6.7 (10 April 2014)

Fixes:

  • Fix a test failure when configured with --enable-undoc.
  • Run the pager in man's original working directory rather than in the manual hierarchy. (As a result of this fix, man-db now requires libpipeline >= 1.3.0.)
  • mandb only creates a cache directory tag if the catpath is different from the manpath, since it should only be created in directories that consist entirely of cached information.

man-db 2.6.6 (23 January 2014)

man-db is now revision-controlled using git (https://git-scm.com/). See docs/HACKING for the location of the repository.

Fixes:

  • apropos's --and option now works again; it was broken by the optimisations in 2.6.2.
  • Restore compatibility with Automake 1.10.
  • Improve support for translation of common elements of help messages.
  • Don't issue error messages when the database refers to a page that no longer exists.
  • Pass macro and hyphenation language tags to groff again (broken in 2.6.5).

Improvements:

  • ./configure --with-override-dir=OVERRIDE arranges to look for manual pages in DIR/OVERRIDE before each path element DIR.

man-db 2.6.5 (27 June 2013)

Fixes:

  • man's --warnings option works again on systems with versions of groff that support it (broken in 2.6.4).
  • man automatically falls back to C.UTF-8 and then en_US.UTF-8 if trying to find a UTF-8 locale on a system without /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED.

man-db 2.6.4 (23 June 2013)

Fixes:

  • man(1) and catman(8) now document the default section list set at configure time.
  • Build fixes for Automake 1.13.
  • man-db 2.6.0 arranged to search the full manpath when expanding .so directives in manual pages (so that .so name.1 works as well as .so man1/name.1), but this incorrectly did not take effect for manual pages that consist only of a .so directive. This is now fixed.

Improvements:

  • The MANLESS environment variable is now treated as if it were a default value for the -r option to man: occurrences of the text $MAN_PN are expanded, and explicitly using the -r option overrides the default.
  • The (unfortunately still hardcoded) maximum length for paths to manual page hierarchies in the configuration file is now 511 characters rather than 49.
  • MANPATH entries now undergo glob(7)-style wildcard expansion, allowing entries such as /opt/*/man.

man-db 2.6.3 (17 September 2012)

Fixes:

  • Build fixes for glibc 2.16 and Automake 1.12.

man-db 2.6.2 (18 June 2012)

Fixes:

  • apropos prints an error message and returns non-zero when it finds no matches. (Regression introduced in 2.5.1.)
  • The presence of a 64-bit GDBM database on the manpath no longer causes a 32-bit man process to exit with a fatal error.

Improvements:

  • apropos is much faster when run with many arguments.
  • whatis may be given the full path to an executable as an argument, in which case it will look up the base name of that executable in the appropriate parts of the manpath.

man-db 2.6.1 (14 February 2012)

Fixes:

  • --with-db=db* and --with-db=ndbm compile again.
  • Translated manual pages are no longer displayed starting with a spurious blank line.
  • straycats tries to ensure that col is invoked with LC_CTYPE set to a UTF-8 locale.
  • Fix double-free in mandb when encountering a symlink outside the manual hierarchy, thanks to Peter Schiffer.

Improvements:

  • mandb creates a cache directory tag, per the Cache Directory Tagging Standard.
  • Add support for Lzip-compressed manual pages, thanks to Matias A. Fonzo.
  • Running man -w (with a new --path alias) without a name now prints the manpath, for compatibility with other man implementations. The vim viewdoc plugin makes use of this.

man-db 2.6.0.2 (13 April 2011)

Fixes:

  • Fix a segfault when scanning links to empty pages.
  • Once we've seen at least one record in a page's NAME section, ignore any further records that don't include a whatis description, as they tend to be noise.

man-db 2.6.0.1 (10 April 2011)

Fixes:

  • Ensure that the target of a symlink or .so chain is always recorded as a real page.
  • Read a user-specified configuration file even if HOME is unset.

man-db 2.6.0 (9 April 2011)

Fixes:

  • Fix build with versions of GNU ld that default to --no-copy-dt-needed-entries.
  • Fix failure to display manual pages in some encodings when installed setuid.
  • Wrap long table cells in man(1), fixing test failures with groff 1.21.
  • If an explicit section is passed to man, then pages that match that section exactly will be preferred over pages that only have that section as a prefix.
  • Fix a segfault when man -K tries to display certain pages.
  • Fix a segfault in some situations when processes are killed by SIGHUP, SIGINT, or SIGTERM.

Improvements:

  • As promised in the release notes for man-db 2.5.8, man-db no longer ships its own copy of libpipeline. You must build and install that library separately.
  • Search the full manpath when expanding .so directives in manual pages. As part of this, .so name.1 should now work as well as .so man1/name.1.
  • lexgrog handles roff named glyphs and perldoc strings in NAME sections.
  • man no longer starts a pager if standard output is not a tty.
  • The -s option to whatis and apropos now takes a colon- or comma-separated list of sections, similar to man -S.
  • mandb error output is neater when stderr is not a terminal.
  • Add basic support for the implementation of nroff/troff in the Heirloom Documentation Tools. Title lengths are not properly set as yet, and many features are untested.
  • mandb removes cat* and NLS subdirectories of cat directories whose corresponding man directories no longer exist.
  • mandb forces SIGPIPE back to its default disposition on startup, to avoid noisy output in case it was started in a context where SIGPIPE was ignored.
  • SECTION entries in a user configuration file now override those in the system configuration file, rather than appending to them.
  • The default less prompt now includes "(press h for help or q to quit)" to help novices find their way around.
  • man-db may now be built to use Berkeley DB version 5 (--with-db=db5).

man-db 2.5.9 (17 November 2010)

Fixes:

  • Fix test failures on some systems. A change made in 2.5.8 was overly sensitive to directory ordering.
  • Configuring with --disable-nls works again.

man-db 2.5.8 (15 November 2010)

Fixes:

  • Fix assertion failure on man -l with an uncompressed page and any of --no-hyphenation, --no-justification, or a non-English page.
  • 2.5.7 introduced a regression when running catman in some locales, most notably in the C locale: while converting the output to UTF-8, iconv was run after the compressor rather than before it. This release fixes that.

Improvements:

  • Add support for XZ-compressed manual pages, thanks to Darren Salt.
  • Try underscore-separated subpages as well as hyphen-separated ones, thanks to Tanguy Ortolo.
  • Build libman and libmandb as shared libraries, reducing installed footprint by about 200K (at least on GNU/Linux).
  • libintl is no longer shipped with man-db. If your system does not already have GNU libintl installed and you want man-db's messages to be translated, then please install GNU libintl separately.
  • Warnings about unrecognised locales are now suppressed if the DPKG_RUNNING_VERSION environment variable is set (i.e. man-db is running within a Debian package's maintainer script), since the system locales are often out of sync with the C library in that context. Thanks to the Debian Perl maintainers for the idea.
  • Allow building with an external libpipeline, which has been split out from man-db. This is a transitional measure: a future version of man-db will stop shipping its own copy of libpipeline.
  • mandb should no longer repeatedly rescan manual page hierarchies when a whatis entry turns into a broken link.

man-db 2.5.7 (16 February 2010)

Fixes:

  • If a subprocess exits before man manages to read all the output from it, it now drains the output file descriptor rather than immediately discarding it.
  • If /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED is available, man attempts to use it to ensure that LC_CTYPE is set to an appropriate locale for the selected character set when invoking col. This fixes LANG=C man -E UTF-8, as used by lintian.
  • Don't run tests if cross-compiling.
  • Fix possible mandb crash when MAN_MUST_CREATE is unset.

Improvements:

  • man can now tell nroff to disable justification if the --no-justification option is used.
  • If the full path to an executable is given as an argument, man will try looking up the corresponding manual page in the appropriate part of the manpath, rather than just trying to format the text of the executable as a manual page.
  • In the GNU manual hierarchy layout, search man<sec><ext> directories as well as just man<sec> (e.g. /usr/share/man/man3p as well as /usr/share/man/man3).
  • By request, man now prefers getting a page from the best manual section over getting a page in the correct language.
  • All programs now support a MAN_DEBUG environment variable which can be used in place of the -d/--debug option. This is useful in some situations where a program is being called deep in a process tree.
  • man-db now builds with heirloom-doctools, thanks to Diego Pettenò of Gentoo.
  • Add support for emulating pipe() with socketpair(), which is faster on some systems; thanks to Werner Fink of SUSE.
  • Cat pages are now always saved in UTF-8, and converted to the proper encoding at display time, which means that cat pages can now be saved regardless of locale. Note that a consequence of this is that cat pages now include formatting information (e.g. overstriking) and need to be run through col(1) before display.

man-db 2.5.6 (26 August 2009)

Fixes:

  • Exact-section database lookups were incorrectly returning all database entries whose section names were prefixes of the requested section name. In some cases this could confuse mandb into never believing that the database was up to date.
  • Fix handling of pages with comma-separated names ("foo, bar, baz") in their NAME sections, broken by a change in 2.5.0 (!) to ignore manual page names containing spaces.
  • Fixed a buffer overflow in the pipeline library's line-reading functions. I don't believe this to be exploitable: at worst we might believe that there's some garbage at the end of manual pages (whose contents are untrusted anyway) and this bug typically resulted in a failed assertion the next time anything tried to read a line.
  • Plugged two substantial memory leaks in the pipeline library.
  • whatis and apropos only display any given manual page, or pointers to it, once.
  • man now sets less(1)'s environment up correctly for manual pages encoded in CP1251.
  • manconv no longer confuses situations such as "this UTF-8 character is not representable in the target encoding" with "this text is not in UTF-8".

Improvements:

  • The default configuration file now includes section 0, used on some systems to document C library header files.
  • make check now passes in the presence of a UTF-8-aware col, such as that in util-linux-ng.
  • The man -K option is now supported to search the full text of all manual pages. This was inspired by a similar option in the other man package (currently at version 1.6f) currently maintained by Federico Lucifredi and formerly by Andries Brouwer, but I took advantage of man-db's pipeline library to implement it entirely in-process, without having to start a separate grep process for every manual page. In my tests with fairly typical searches across variously all manual pages or just one section, man-db's implementation ran between 3 and 10 times faster.
  • Database directories are now only created when there are corresponding manual page directories, not just because they're mentioned in the configuration file.
  • By default, man will now try to interpret pairs of manual page names given on the command line as equivalent to a single manual page name containing a hyphen (e.g. man foo bar => foo-bar(1)). This supports the common pattern of programs that implement a number of subcommands, allowing them to provide manual pages for each that can be accessed using similar syntax as would be used to invoke the subcommands themselves. Suggested by H. Peter Anvin, Federico Lucifredi, and others on the git mailing list.
  • The build process is now quieter by default. Use ./configure --disable-silent-rules or make V=0 if you don't like this or your make(1) doesn't support the non-standard extension required.
  • make install now installs the manual.
  • manconv understands a wider range of Emacs-style coding tags.
  • Recommendations to change MAN_DB_CREATES, MAN_DB_UPDATES, and MAN_CATS #define options in manconfig.h have been replaced by new configure options --enable-automatic-create, --disable-automatic-update, and --disable-cats respectively. Note that automatic user database creation is now off by default, as it is often too slow for the usefulness it adds; use --enable-automatic-create to enable it.

man-db 2.5.5 (14 March 2009)

Fixes:

  • Pages that declare a non-default encoding in their preprocessor lines are now handled correctly.
  • Fix an uninitialised variable when sorting manual page candidates that could lead to excessive memory allocation and possible crashes.

Improvements:

  • man-db's make check now tests that all its own manual pages format without errors or warnings from groff, to ensure a better-quality release.

man-db 2.5.4 (24 February 2009)

Fixes:

  • Build fixes for systems without GNU Make, and for systems without gettext; this successfully covers at least FreeBSD.
  • The distclean target now works if po4a isn't installed.
  • Exit as soon as possible if database writes return ENOSPC.
  • lexgrog now stops on any unrecognised roff request, rather than continuing and often littering the database with garbage.
  • man no longer requires both standard input and standard output to be terminals in order to use the terminal line length. The line length from standard output is preferred if available.
  • The manpath was built completely wrongly when multiple entries were present in LANGUAGE: duplicates were handled strangely, and languages were effectively iterated in reverse order. It should be rather more sensible now.

Improvements:

  • The MAN_KEEP_STDERR environment variable can now be used to override man's default of discarding stderr when stdout is a terminal.
  • Handling of terminal widths for cat pages is now configurable, using the MINCATWIDTH, MAXCATWIDTH, and CATWIDTH configuration file directives.
  • man -a now detects duplicate manual page candidates more reliably, and sorts them better.
  • Belarusian, Estonian, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian pages are now supported.
  • man can now search for pages using regular expressions (with --regex) or shell wildcards (with --wildcard). By default this searches both page names and descriptions, like apropos, but if the --names-only option is used then it searches page names only, like whatis.
  • man can now tell nroff to disable hyphenation if the --no-hyphenation option is used.
  • man-db already searched for manual pages in ../man and man directories relative to each $PATH component; it now searches in ../share/man and share/man directories too.
  • Groff 1.20 was recently released, including the preconv preprocessor. Although man-db has supported preconv to some extent since 2.4.4, man-db's configure now detects its presence and infers that groff supports Unicode input using it; man also now takes slightly better advantage of preconv than before.
  • Per-locale groff macros are now loaded if possible, allowing us to take advantage of such things as localised versions of predefined strings and language-aware hyphenation. This only works with Groff 1.20.2 or better (not yet released), since earlier versions did not allow us to suppress warnings in the event that the appropriate macro file is not available.

man-db 2.5.3 (17 November 2008)

Fixes:

  • Cleaned up a number of possible crashes, memory leaks, and missing error checks found by the Coverity Scan project.
  • Fix build if MAN_CATS is undefined.
  • If the LINGUAS environment variable is set while running configure, it now controls building and installation of localised manual pages as well as program translations.
  • The LANGUAGE environment variable is now tokenised properly, rather than only taking the first two characters of each element.
  • Fix build if --disable-nls is used or iconv is not available.
  • man now correctly propagates the exit code of whatis or apropos when called with the -f or -k option respectively.

Improvements:

  • A number of inconsistencies and readability problems with man-db's own manual pages have been cleaned up, thanks mainly to Yuri Kozlov.
  • Reduce the number of warnings emitted when using an unrecognised locale.
  • manconv and zsoelim are now called internally rather than by executing external programs, to improve performance.
  • man-db now uses GDBM (--with-db=gdbm) in preference to Berkeley DB (--with-db=db or --with-db=dbN where N is 1, 2, 3, or 4) by default, since hardware improvements have rendered Berkeley DB's speed advantages negligible for our purposes and the relatively frequent SONAME and on-disk format changes are not worth the hassle. Distributors should note that if they follow this change then they will need to arrange for databases to be rebuilt on upgrade to this version.
  • Manual pages may now be compressed with LZMA (although this is probably only worth it for very large pages).
  • Duplicate manual page hierarchies due to symlinks (e.g. /usr/man -> /usr/share/man) are detected and removed from the search order.
  • A locale modifier (e.g. @latin) in a directory name must now match the locale if the former is set, in addition to the language and territory.
  • Bare .so includes (e.g. .so foo.1 rather than .so man1/foo.1) now work, although only within the same manual page hierarchy for now.

man-db 2.5.2 (5 May 2008)

Fixes:

  • man -H (without a browser argument) was completely broken in 2.5.1 and is now fixed.
  • man no longer breaks in Japanese locales when using less as a pager.

Improvements:

  • The --encoding option to man can now take a true character encoding rather than a *roff device; the latter was an unreliable, inflexible, and awkward way to select an output encoding. The old semantics are still supported for backward compatibility.
  • Whatis parsing stops at .ie or .if conditionals.
  • CJK locale specifications where the codeset component is equivalent to but not stringwise-identical to UTF-8 (e.g. zh_CN.utf8) are handled better.
  • man(1)'s OPTIONS section is ordered more comprehensibly.
  • apropos, lexgrog, man, mandb, and whatis ignore encoding conversion errors for the last possible encoding of the source page. This helps, for example, with pages including misencoded non-ASCII names of authors; it usually seems better to allow these pages to pass with small errors than to break them entirely.

man-db 2.5.1 (28 January 2008)

Fixes:

  • The manual is now built automatically, avoiding some ordering problems on make distclean.
  • Manual pages are converted to the proper input encoding for troff output as well as nroff output.
  • The -t, -T, -X, and -Z options to man work again; in 2.5.0, they read input from stdin rather than from the manual page.
  • apropos and whatis no longer segfault when given an explicit locale using -L.
  • man now understands that groff's ascii device takes ASCII input, not ISO-8859-1.
  • man no longer discards stderr when writing to a file or a pipe; this was broken by an overenthusiastic change in 2.5.0.
  • manconv now falls back to the next encoding in its list if any characters in an entire 64KB block fail to decode using the current encoding, as was originally intended.
  • manconv is more careful about extracting coding: directives from manual pages.
  • Ctrl-C and Ctrl-\ now work again at the prompt issued by man -a.

Improvements:

  • There is a new --with-sections configure option to change the default value of SECTION in the configuration file.
  • Automake is now used to generate Makefiles. Among other things, this fixes VPATH builds and some bugs in dependency generation, and should allow building with non-GNU versions of make.
  • man-db now uses the Gnulib portability library, allowing the removal of earlier haphazard portability code. While this results in a somewhat larger source distribution, it makes man-db easier to maintain and should make it easier to build on systems to which the maintainer does not have access.
  • In the process of switching to Gnulib, the last vestiges of pre-C89 support have been removed; they were documented to be broken anyway.
  • If the MANROFFOPT environment variable is set, man now appends its value to the *roff command line.
  • man now accepts a --recode option to output a source manual page converted to a specified encoding.
  • For compatibility with System V, man accepts -s as an alias for -S, and permits sections to be comma-separated as well as colon-separated.
  • All programs, except the obsolete wrapper, now accept a --debug option. (accessdb, lexgrog, and zsoelim were lacking it.)
  • man now accepts a --warnings option to enable groff warnings.

man-db 2.5.0 (7 October 2007)

Fixes:

  • mandb --quiet now suppresses several more warnings.
  • The output of apropos no longer includes duplicates when multiple search terms are used.

Improvements:

  • Databases are now created for non-English manual hierarchies. All database entries should be encoded in UTF-8; man-db converts from the character set of the manual hierarchy and to the character set specified in the user's locale as necessary.
  • Per-locale directory handling has been improved. Directories such as fr.UTF-8 may be used for occasions when it is appropriate to specify the character set but not the country, and so a full locale name is inconvenient.
  • There is a new manconv program which can try multiple possible encodings for a file, thus allowing UTF-8 manual pages to be installed in any directory even without an explicit encoding declaration.
  • A decompression library is now in place. This allows man-db to use zlib to decompress gzipped files, and allows most of its uses of temporary files to be removed. The only remaining exceptions are cat file creation (which uses a temporary file in the cat tree rather than in /tmp) and viewing HTML manual pages (which uses a temporary directory). Otherwise, man-db should now work fine even with a read-only /tmp during system recovery.
  • Cat pages are now saved in the background while the pager is active, so man will only need to block afterwards if the pager is exited very quickly.
  • --with-* options are now available at configure time for most of the auxiliary program locations that you might want to override.
  • man now supports the MANPAGER environment variable, overriding PAGER.
  • apropos/whatis output is now truncated to the terminal width by default. As with man, this may be overridden using the MANWIDTH environment variable.
  • lexgrog now ignores alleged manual page names containing spaces, as these usually indicate parsing errors or ill-formed NAME sections and they clutter up apropos output badly. I'm only aware of one legitimate counterexample, the Intercal compiler "oo, ick", which no longer appears to be known by that name anyway; let me know if there are any others.
  • man now discards stderr from formatting subprocesses when outputting to a pager, to avoid visual corruption from any error messages.
  • If the MAN_KEEP_FORMATTING environment variable is set to any non-empty value, then man will preserve formatting characters in its output even when standard output is not a terminal. This may be useful for programs such as pinfo that call man and can interpret its formatted output.
  • Setting NOCACHE in the configuration file now prevents man from ever creating cat pages automatically.
  • apropos now accepts the --and option to display only items that match all the supplied keywords.

man-db 2.4.4 (12 February 2007)

man-db is now revision-controlled using bzr. See docs/HACKING for the location of the archive (including all CVS history, imported by Canonical).

Fixes:

  • SECURITY: Fix a buffer overrun if using -H and the designated web browser (argument to -H or $BROWSER) contains multiple %s expansions. This is CVE-2006-4250.
  • Ignore SIGINT and SIGQUIT while running subprocesses, so that typing Ctrl-C doesn't kill less (broken in 2.4.3).
  • Similarly, ignore SIGPIPE in subprocesses.
  • Various fixes to SIGCHLD handling in pipeline library, preventing "waitpid failed: No child processes" errors.
  • Skip exec in configuration file commands (perhaps left over from old installations), which the pipeline execution library cannot handle directly.

Improvements:

  • Add support for Chinese in the --enable-mb-groff case.
  • lexgrog now handles pages with multiple descriptions more usefully, by displaying one description per output line.

man-db 2.4.3 (3 July 2005)

Fixes:

  • Avoid problems creating databases on systems with badly broken clocks set before the Unix epoch.
  • Fix detection of decompression programs, so that man doesn't attempt to execute man pages when it doesn't have a corresponding decompression program.

Improvements:

  • apropos and whatis now accept a --section option to restrict their search to a particular manual section.
  • The pipeline execution library is now used for most calls to external programs, avoiding use of the shell.
  • When stdout is not a terminal, man pages will be formatted in plain text without the use of backspace or ANSI formatting characters.
  • When invoking apropos (man -k) or whatis (man -f) as external programs, man now only passes through command-line options understood by the respective programs.
  • Improve handling of locales with versions and/or modifiers.
  • Add support for Croatian, Galician, Indonesian, Slovak, and Turkish pages.
  • man-db may now be built to use Berkeley DB version 4 (--with-db=db4).

Compatibility notes:

  • Setting the line length of manual pages now requires groff 1.18 or later.

man-db 2.4.2 (20 September 2003)

Fixes:

  • SECURITY: Fix a number of buffer overruns in configuration file handling, ultimate source location, and MANPATH processing. This is CVE CAN-2003-0620.
  • SECURITY: Restrict the use of the DEFINE directive in ~/.manpath to code running with dropped privilege. Previously, the compressor variable could be used to run arbitrary code with raised privilege. This is CVE CAN-2003-0645.
  • Make sure to initialize mandata structures to zero. The uses of uninitialized memory resulting from this had been leading to random segfaults.
  • Drop privileges in order to be able to read pages in non-world-readable user manpaths while setuid.
  • man can be built with --disable-setuid again.
  • man's locale support has been revamped. The encoding of source manual pages is no longer related to the encoding of the input passed to *roff or to *roff's terminal output device. These frequently differ, especially in UTF-8 locales but in other circumstances as well, and a "just send 8-bit data" approach is no longer adequate. If you are using a version of groff with the Debian multibyte patch applied, pass the --enable-mb-groff option to configure.
  • When using GDBM, accessdb and apropos did not return database entries in sorted order, since GDBM's key traversal interface is not lexicographically ordered. The database layer has been corrected to cope with this.
  • Directories found in strange places in manual hierarchies don't crash mandb.

Improvements:

  • man now calls mandb to update databases rather than doing it itself. This leaves cat pages as the sole remaining reason for man to be setuid.
  • The "undocumented" message is only displayed if a corresponding executable is found on the $PATH.
  • All programs that read ~/.manpath now take a -C option to cause them to read a different user configuration file instead.
  • The --enable-debug option to configure has been removed. man-db's Makefiles now always calculate full dependencies for C files.
  • mandb caches the contents of directories, significantly speeding up the purging of obsolete entries.
  • mandb now knows how to purge database entries corresponding to removed stray cat pages.
  • In addition, a pipeline execution library has been written, which will make it possible to eliminate all or almost all use of the shell in a future release. Unfortunately, time pressures due to the security issues above meant that the pipeline library was not well enough tested for use in this release, so it is present but unused. That will be the first item for 2.4.3.

man-db 2.4.1 (22 December 2002)

The man-db CVS repository has moved from sourceforge.net to savannah.nongnu.org.

Fixes:

  • Don't enter an infinite loop when the SYSTEM environment variable is set.
  • man doesn't segfault when trying to follow a broken symlink.
  • mandb no longer corrupts databases when deleting entries that are part of multi keys.
  • Prevent a possible buffer overflow when encountering large multi keys.
  • Man page names are escaped when globbing, so [(1) can now be found even if the database is not up to date.
  • Correct an access() check that led to man -X -l - producing no output.
  • lexgrog can now cope with man pages containing only a .so link.
  • Manual hierarchies with a specific encoding are put into the search path in the correct order. A bug in $LANGUAGE handling had formerly meant that de would take precedence over de_DE.UTF-8.

Improvements:

  • man's behaviour when searching for page names that begin with a digit has been made more intuitive, as has its treatment of section names that are extensions of ones mentioned in the configuration file but are not themselves explicitly named as sections.
  • The default line length for pages formatted for terminal output has been increased (reducing margin size) to match the default in groff 1.18.
  • Proofread the manual.
  • The -w flag to man has been changed to display the name of only the source nroff file. A -W flag has been introduced which displays the name of the cat file as well. If both flags are given to man, it will behave as before.
  • If bzip2 is installed, pages compressed with bzip2 can now be displayed.
  • Add support for displaying an additional message when no man page is found, which can be used to direct users to a generic "undocumented" page.
  • The manual hierarchy layout will now be guessed where possible if an explicit --enable-mandirs argument is not passed to configure.

man-db 2.4.0 (26 June 2002)

I have changed the package name to man-db, as the underscore was awkward.

Upgrading from version 2.3.x:

  • The database format has changed slightly, so you will need to run mandb --create after installing the new version to rebuild your databases from scratch. (Distribution packages should do this automatically for system databases.)

Fixes:

  • The GNU nroff test in configure now works when /bin/sh is ash.
  • When scanning pages for NAME sections, lexgrog and mandb no longer accidentally eat the line after each occurrence of the no-op request ..
  • man --local drops privileges throughout to avoid problems with non-world-readable home directories.
  • Newly created cat directories are chowned to the man user when running as root.
  • man --html no longer creates its temporary file with raised privileges, so that it now works with a setuid man.
  • man detects preprocessors correctly when setuid.
  • Various segfault fixes: explicitly null-terminate data returned by the Berkeley DB library to avoid some rare crashes; don't reuse a freed pointer in some cases of pages with multiple names; handle MANPATHs containing :: more safely.
  • Correctly parse manual pages using DOS line-ending conventions.
  • Work around a misfeature in Berkeley DB: it pauses for several seconds if asked to read a zero-length database, on the assumption that somebody is still writing the metadata page. man is generally better off just ignoring the database in this case.
  • Work around corrupted databases in the case where the nextkey pointer chain contains a loop.

Improvements:

  • man looks in the filesystem followed by the database, rather than the other way round. Unix filesystems are quite good databases for this purpose, and the man database is only superior when looking up names that don't have associated links in the filesystem.
  • apropos --wildcard --exact makes sure wildcards match an entire description or page name, unlike apropos --wildcard which may match on word boundaries too.
  • man's page-searching code has been substantially rearranged, and now only starts displaying pages when it has finished searching for candidates. This allows pages to be sorted more sensibly.
  • Manual pages are formatted in UTF-8 if that is the current locale's character set. The -E option is now available to force a particular encoding. Note that some versions of (e.g.) less have problems displaying UTF-8 in conjunction with backspace characters; groff 1.18 should alleviate this by using ANSI colour escapes instead.
  • The less prompt string sets -PM as well as -Pm.
  • Invoking man from within less now sets the correct page title in the inner less.
  • Unless the --match-case option is used, man will search for pages case-insensitively.
  • Update the mechanism for setting the line length so that it also works with groff 1.18.
  • The -R switch is added to the less prompt string, which is needed to display the ANSI colour escapes generated by groff 1.18 correctly.
  • The $MANLESS environment variable may be used to override the normal creation of the less prompt string.
  • Translation updates for French, German, and Spanish, and a new Catalan translation. See man/THANKS.

man_db-2.3.20 (7 September 2001)

Fixes:

  • A typo in 2.3.19 caused character sets for many languages to be detected incorrectly. This especially affected multibyte languages.
  • Long options in the environment variable LESS are handled correctly.
  • When checking if cat pages need to be updated, check for different timestamps rather than whether the cat page is newer, as otherwise we were confused by tools like tar that preserve timestamps in their archives. Each cat page is now set to have the same mtime as its corresponding man page.
  • Look up the correct character set each time a page is displayed rather than just the first time, in case pages in several different character sets are viewed in a single session.
  • groff requests are no longer assumed to be case-insensitive when scanning for preprocessors, so for example mdoc's .Eq request isn't mistaken for the .EQ which introduces eqn commands.
  • Escape arguments passed to the shell that might contain dangerous characters.
  • Avoid an infinite loop if the LANGUAGE environment variable is set but empty.
  • The --create option to mandb now implies --no-purge.
  • Temporary files are handled with more secure permissions.

Improvements:

  • Use a variant of mkstemp() rather than tempnam(), to avoid classic race conditions. (I don't believe the races were usefully exploitable.)
  • Tolerate whatis entries in a database that point to themselves.
  • Detect more translations of the NAME section.
  • Add examples of man pages written in POD and SGML.
  • lexgrog is now installed in /usr/bin by default, with proper argument parsing, an improved output format, and a man page. It is expected to be used by programs that need to validate man pages.
  • The -H (--html) option to man is now compiled in by default, and supports the BROWSER specification (as documented and amended).

man_db-2.3.19 (5 July 2001)

Fixes:

  • The user configuration file ~/.manpath is no longer trusted when deciding whether to drop privileges. In the process, user cat directory handling has been improved.
  • Commands of the form man -S "" foo formerly emptied the list of acceptable sections and then searched the database anyway, and commands of the form man -S ::: foo segfaulted. Both now use the standard list of sections.
  • The HUP and TERM signals are now handled better.
  • straycats processing invokes col -bx rather than col-bx.
  • The root user is now correctly allowed to update databases in system manpaths.
  • apropos and whatis no longer enter infinite recursion if a database contains an entry pointing to itself.

Improvements:

  • When compiled with --enable-setuid, man and mandb can be installed non-setuid. In this mode, they will be unable to write cat pages in system directories or to modify system databases, but will otherwise operate correctly. This allows a single binary package to support setuid and non-setuid modes of operation.
  • The ordering of manual sections is read from SECTION directives in the configuration file rather than being hard-coded.
  • The MANDB_MAP configuration file directive is documented more clearly.
  • Multiple whatis entries separated by commas, break requests, and/or paragraph requests are handled more intelligently.
  • Fill control requests (.nf and .fi) cause lexgrog to assume a break at each newline.
  • Duplicate manpath entries (often generated in the course of national language support) are removed, so that man -a works better.
  • man_db's binaries are installed unstripped by default.
  • Since supporting certain layouts of manual page hierarchies causes problems for others, the layout is now selectable via configure. The default is to try all layouts.
  • man only does an on-the-fly update of the database caches when the --update option is given.
  • Manual pages are displayed with a line length appropriate to the current terminal. If a non-standard line length is used (i.e. the terminal is not between 66 and 80 characters wide) then cat pages will not be saved.
  • mandb tries to purge obsolete entries from its databases. Using the --create flag should now usually only be necessary in cases of database corruption.

man_db-2.3.18 (14 May 2001)

man_db-2.3.18 is an interim release under new maintenance by Colin Watson, merging much of the work done by former maintainers (Graeme Wilford and Fabrizio Polacco). It incorporates several years of changes made in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution's package of man_db.

Here are a few highlights, with the names of the maintainers responsible for them. As I am documenting after the fact of other people's changes of a few years ago, I have undoubtedly missed a number of fixes and improvements; I promise to keep track of these as I go along in future.

Fixes:

  • Multiple security fixes, including better handling of temporary files, a format string vulnerability fix, and more careful dropping of privileges when running setuid. [Fabrizio, Colin]
  • Databases no longer disappear temporarily while they are being regenerated. [Fabrizio]
  • Corrected handling of locale environment variables. Setting several colon-separated locales in $LANGUAGE also works now. [Colin]
  • whatis and apropos are more careful about the possibility of a corrupted database. [Fabrizio, Colin]

Improvements:

  • If root has private manual hierarchies, cat pages generated from them are no longer chowned to a less-privileged user. [Wilf]
  • Rewrote configuration file handling, adding DEFINE directives to set paths to external programs. The configuration file is now called man_db.conf. [Wilf]
  • Support FHS paths (/usr/share/man and /var/cache/man) in preference to FSSTND paths (/usr/man and /var/catman). [Fabrizio]
  • Converted from catgets to GNU gettext for national language support. [Fabrizio, Colin]
  • Several new and improved localized message catalogues and translated man pages. [Fabrizio, Colin, other contributors]
  • Added accessdb utility, which displays the contents of a manual page database. [Fabrizio]
  • Added user configuration file ~/.manpath, with the same syntax as the global configuration file. [Fabrizio]
  • Leading or trailing colons in the MANPATH environment variable cause the manpath derived from configuration files to be prepended or appended respectively. A double colon in the middle of the environment variable causes the configuration file manpath to be inserted between the colons. [Fabrizio]
  • Added experimental -H and -Thtml options to take advantage of groff's new HTML driver. [Fabrizio]
  • lexgrog now scans manual pages to guess which preprocessors are needed. [Fabrizio]
  • Create cat directories on the fly if necessary. [Fabrizio]
  • Supply a wrapper which explicitly drops privileges to uid man if man or mandb is run as root. In the future, splitting out setuid functions into a separate helper process may remove the need for this paranoia. [Fabrizio]
  • Add --test option to mandb, which merely reports errors in manual page hierarchies rather than actually creating or updating a database. [Fabrizio, Colin]
  • Manual pages may now be symlinks outside the mantree. This should pose no significant security concerns, and utilities such as GNU stow create such symlinks. [Colin]
  • Deprecate whatis references for man, and display a warning if displaying a page relies on going through a whatis reference. They often lead to confusingly non-obviously-deterministic behaviour, and guaranteeing that man will honour them even when the database is out of date causes performance problems. [Colin]

man_db-2.3.11 (21 September 1995)

  • The man_db manual is bundled in source form.
  • Components of $PATH not in the config file were checked for man subdirectories. Now they are also checked for ../man.
  • Untarring a new manual page (with a timestamp older than the relative cat file) over the original did not cause man/catman to reformat the replacement. This is changed. As a side effect, untarring an unchanged man file over the original will also cause a reformat.

man_db-2.3.10 (13 July 1995)

Fixes:

  • Global databases were not owned by setuid owner (if applicable). As a consequence only mandb could update the databases unless man was run by superuser. Stupid bug.
  • The keyword passed to apropos never matched the first word of any whatis line.
  • FAVOUR_STRAYCATS code (if enabled), did not work properly.
  • zsoelim did not work as advertised.

Improvements:

  • man removes its temporary files upon abnormal termination.

  • apropos does proper word matching rather than the fuzzy matching of 2.3.5. E.g. supplying any of the keywords: ld.so, a.out, dynamic, linker or loader will match the following entry:

    ld.so (8) - a.out dynamic linker/loader

    whereas a.out and loader used to fail.

  • man/whatis/apropos return with exit code 16 if manual page/file or keyword is not matched. Previously exit code 0 was used making it difficult for callers to know if the lookup was successful.

  • Addition of German message catalogue.

  • apropos and man -k do POSIX specified regex matching rather than keyword searches if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is defined.

  • Added glob-only support of native system manual hierarchies on HP-UX, OSF and Solaris operating systems. Improved the whatis parsing code to cope with majority of HP-UX manual pages.

  • Ported to NeXTstep.

man_db-2.3.5 (21 April 1995)

Added support for:

  • Non-standard section names i.e. multi-character

  • Compressed manual pages.

    A new utility zsoelim is included to correctly handle nroff .so requests that point to a file which has been compressed.

  • Compressed stray cats.

    By definition, stray cats are not re-creatable as they have no relative source manual page. As they may have non-default compression extensions and may reside on read-only media, stray cats have the same compression support as manual pages.

  • FSSTND proposed "extension" support.

    Specific package manual pages may be installed in the standard sections but with a package-unique extension appended as in exit(3tcl) - ../man/man3/exit.3tcl. Using the command man -e tcl exit would then display an exit manual page with a tcl extension, if available. Of course, man 3tcl exit works as always.

  • FSSTND proposed NLS man subdirectories of the form .../man/<locale>/man<sec>/.

  • NLS message catalogue hooks.

    Provision has been made for the programs to emit their messages in a language dependent form.

  • whatis referred manual pages.

    Some manual pages contain relevant information for commands or programs that would not otherwise reference the page. The whatis part of the manual page is used to create virtual links to these pages by all of the names mentioned within it. Examples include names such as . and : referencing the local shell manual page.

  • catman utility, used to pre-format the manual pages into cat pages.

  • Operating systems other than Linux.

    man_db has been reported to compile on the following platforms: Linux, SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, OSF, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX (although portability does not extend to support of native manual tree structures on some of these systems, e.g. HP-UX).

  • Berkeley DB library routines.

    This complements the support of both gdbm and ndbm which already existed. DB databases may be shared across platforms.

  • $MANOPTS environment variable.

    The environment variable MANOPTS may be set to any string in command line option/argument format. It is parsed by man(1) prior to its actual command line.

  • Per manual hierarchy cat directory locations.

    It is possible to redirect your cat pages to other directories or even other file systems.

  • Per manual hierarchy nroff/[tg]roff format scripts.

    Ability to create custom formatter scripts that are called by man(1) to enable format/display of non-standard manual pages or manual pages requiring a special macro package.

  • Extension of man -l.

    Arguments following -l are interpreted as local files requiring format and display. Extensions are:

    • man -l - formats and displays stdin.
    • man -l foo.1.gz decompresses, formats and displays foo.1.gz.

  • Latin1 manual pages/choice of nroff output device.

  • Viewing of ASCII manual pages formatted for a latin1 output device on a 7 bit ASCII terminal (-7).

  • whatis and apropos utilities support regex and wildcard matching.

  • checkman.

    Shell script utility that will find and display duplicated manual pages found across manual page hierarchies.

  • mkcatdirs.

    Shell script utility to create appropriate cat directories after installation and setup.

Conceptual improvements:

  • Replacement of single database with multiple modular databases. Easier integration of additional information into the databases in the future.

  • Both user and global databases share the same name index.<db-type>, where <db-type> could be bt, db, or pag and dir.

  • Databases contain whatis text.

    makewhatis and text whatis databases are redundant, although whatis and apropos will use the text whatis database for information if they cannot read from a relevant index database.

  • Straycats handled without need for 'placeholders'.

  • Friendly less(1) prompt.

    If man(1) uses less(1) as its pager (dependent on both static and dynamic factors), the prompt is modified to suit the manual page being displayed. The modification performed is also changeable by the user.

  • man_db manual.

    man_db has a manual that covers the setup, maintenance and use of a generic online manual page system.

  • Modes of operation.

    The man_db utilities can be compiled with various modes of operation in mind. E.g. man can be stopped from updating databases and/or creating cat files in situations where security is extremely important. See the man_db manual for details.

Speed improvements:

  • Background compression/saving of cat files.

    Cat files are compressed and saved in the background, whilst the user is able to browse the formatted page directly.

  • Merge of straycats and makewhatis into mandb.

    While mandb has slowed, it now incorporates makewhatis and straycats functionality and is much faster as a whole. 2.0a2 used grep/awk, 2.2 used C regex and 2.3 now uses lex sourced C to strip out the whatis information from the raw man or cat files.

  • Berkeley DB support.

    Provides lower database initialisation overhead as compared with gdbm.

  • Extremely fast whatis(1) searches.

    whatis(1) uses keyed database lookups to retrieve whatis strings for standard (non regex/wildcard) searches.

Fixes:

  • Correct handling of $MANSECT.

    The environment variable MANSECT is no longer ignored.

  • Acknowledgement of $MANPATH order.

    manpath elements are searched in the order specified.