SUMMARY: Yet Another annoying "man" bug in Solaris 2.5...

From: Christopher L. Barnard (cbarnard@cs.uchicago.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 27 1996 - 14:40:20 CDT


I asked earlier today (paraphrased to make it shorter):

> I'm having an annoying problem with man under Solaris 2.5. My
> problem is with the man pages for the C++ libraries that come with
> the Sun compilers in /opt/SUNWspro/man. My example man page is the
> man page for istream(3C++), which lives in /opt/SUNWspro/man/man3.
> I run /usr/lib/makewhatis regularly, and that script happily incorporates
> this man page into the windex file in /opt/SUNWspro/man. The problem
> is that it records the man section as being section "3C++". So when I
> type "man istream", the man system looks in /opt/SUNWspro/man/man3C++,
> which does not exist, and reports that there is no man page. If I
> type "man -F istream" it happily produces the man page for me. I have
> gone in to the document and edited it, changing the .TH line from
> ".TH ISTREAM 3C++" to ".TH ISTREAM 3", re-run makewhatis, and then
> the man page shows up just fine.
>
> So it seems to me that I have three ugly solutions: create a man3C++
> subdirectory and move the necessary man pages into it, or edit the
> dozen or so man pages to change their section reference from 3C++ to 3,
> or to do a system-wide alias for man to map it to "man -F". The first
> two would be a time consuming pain that would have to be redone every
> time we upgrade the compilers, and the latter would make the windex
> files useless.

I guess this is what I get for not being more specific. I immediately
received 8 responses all telling me to just symlink man3C++ -> man3.
I've done that, and it works, but that's not the solution I had in
mind. I was hoping that I could either change the makewhatis script
(or that there was a patch to the man binary or this script that
I didn't know about) to solve this problem correctly. In any case,
the symlink works so I'll just go with that I guess. Thanks to

blplante@spatial.unisys.com (Brian L Plante)
craven@cg.NRCan.gc.ca (Jim Craven)
vqh@dwrock.dw.lucent.com
bern@penthesilea.uni-trier.de (Jochen Bern)
miquel@proton.uab.es (Miquel Cabanas. BBM-UAB)
Raymond Bero <bero@lternet.washington.edu>
Torsten Metzner <tom@plato.uni-paderborn.de>
poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)

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| Christopher L. Barnard O When I was a boy I was told that |
| cbarnard@cs.uchicago.edu / \ anybody could become president. |
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| http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~cbarnard --Clarence Darrow |
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