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updated by
Christopher Spry
28/06/2020

Guide to installing ‘man’ pages with programs installed separately from IRIX

I am using IRIX 6.2 on an Indy. The most useful source of information about ‘man’ pages is obtained by typing ‘man man’ at the command prompt. I learnt that man pages are read ‘by default’ from the following directories: /usr/share/man, /usr/catman and /usr/man. If there are man pages elsewhere, it is necessary to let your system shell know. The easiest way to do this is to add the paths to these additional programs in the user’s ‘.cshrc’. This is done by setting the ‘MANPATH’ variable. Note that if this is done, the ‘default’ search path is not available, so the ‘default’ paths have to be added to ‘.cshrc’ as well.

As I have additional ‘man’ pages in ‘/usr/local/man’, (a common place for programs to put them) my entry in ‘.cshrc’ is:

Set MANPATH = /usr/share/man:/usr/catman:/usr/man:/usr/local/man

Note that paths are separated by colons.

I will add more directories with 'man pages 'as I find them, but I expect that most programs will load them to /usr/local/man and its subdirectories.

The directories named in MANPATH are searched downwards, so there is no need to enter further subdirectories.

The ‘man’ command can show both ‘formatted’ ‘man’ entries or process unformatted entries ‘on the fly’. ‘man’ files, which are found in directories called ‘cat[1-8nopD]’ are already formatted (their names end in ‘gz or z’) and they can be used directly if they are referred to by the command:

bann01.gif (2203 bytes)

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