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Date:      Sat, 15 Dec 2001 11:05:05 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>, Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.org>, Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>, ache@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Changing 'man' to check alternate destination for 'cat' pages
Message-ID:  <20011215110505.H85108@monorchid.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <20011214101857.C35094@sunbay.com>
References:  <20011212001610.9AEA739EA@overcee.netplex.com.au> <p0510100bb83ddfa9e683@[128.113.24.47]> <20011214112255.L3448@monorchid.lemis.com> <20011214101857.C35094@sunbay.com>

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On Friday, 14 December 2001 at 10:18:58 +0200, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 11:22:55AM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
>> On Thursday, 13 December 2001 at  0:01:03 -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>> Under these circumstances it's interesting to know which man pages you
>> have, and where they are.  It also had a 'query' option:
>>
>>   $ man -q ls
>>   -r--r--r--  1     root    wheel         5361 Sat Sep 30 17:13:47 2000 /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz? n
>>   -rw-r--r--  1     root    wheel         3062 Thu Aug 18 21:45:13 1994 /usr/share/man/4.4BSD/cat1/ls.1.gz? n
>>   -r--r--r--  1      bin      bin         9435 Tue Jan 21 00:17:30 1997 /usr/share/man/BSDI/man1/ls.1? n
>>   -rw-r--r--  1     root    wheel         2271 Fri Aug 25 23:54:06 2000 /usr/share/man/linux/man1/ls.1.gz? n
>>   -rw-r--r--  1     root    wheel         4903 Fri Dec 10 09:30:51 1999 /usr/share/man/linux/man1/ls.1? n
>>   -rw-r--r--  1      bin      sys         3354 Fri Jun 27 10:05:42 1975 /usr/share/man/V6/man1/ls.1?
>>
> What are you looking for is already available as:
>
> $ MANPATH=/home/ru/mann:/usr/share/man man -a -w ls
> /home/ru/mann/man1/ls.1
> /usr/share/man/cat1/ls.1.gz (source: /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz)

Not quite.  That corresponds to my man -l command: it just lists them,
it doesn't give you the choice to select them or not.  See the '? n' at
the end of most lines; you can also answer 'y' or 'q'.

>> As regards the cat files, it seems to me that an obvious solution
>> would be to add a CATMAN environment variable which would specify the
>> location of the catman pages, and default to /usr/share/man/cat.
>
> Just having a CATMAN envariable is not enough, this would break many
> things.

Yes, I was leaving that as an exercise for the implementor :-)

> The "cat" feature of man(1) is insecure, and is probably going to be
> nuked after a release of 4.5.

I think this is a pity.  What's the rationale?

> Having catpages:
>
> - is optional
> - can be configured at ``make world'' time

Agreed.

> - in different place can be achieved by using symlinks to cat?.

Yes, but I'd consider this a workaround.

Greg
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