Manpages oddities

General
1

man -k <search pattern> searches for man pages containing the <search pattern>

However it doesn’t show all.

  1. It doesn’t show any man page from brew installed software
  2. It doesn’t show any man page from packages
    • which are layered
    • which are installed in a custom image

Is there anything what can be done here?

2

Hm, something was wrong with the /var/cache/man directory. When I ran sudo mandb all files except the index.db were updated.

So I did the following

  • deleted the /var/cache/man directory
  • ran sudo mandb
  • now index.db was up to date

and man -k works fine again.

Have to investigate what exactly man-db-cache-update.service does.

EDIT: Of course, the only pain point are brew packages whose man pages are not caught.

3

What I did manually, by deleting the /var/cach/man directory and running sudo mandb should be handled correctly by the man-db-restart-cache-update.service

I got man -k … work correctly with brew man pages by adding a line

MANDB_MAP /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/share/man /var/cache/man/linuxbrew

to /etc/man_db.conf

Then running

sudorm -rf /var/cache/man and sudo mandb

Now man -k <pattern> is working fine.

1 Like
4

One (hopefully) last remark. :grin: It seems that sudo systemctl start man-db-restart-cache-update.service works ok as well. Perhaps I initially misinterpreted things here.

5

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