It used to be that if you ran say “man time” you would get a default time page but when you quit it showed a list of other sections/pages that also had time. One page or section (whatever its called) was for the time command, another for the C program time() etc
e,g
time 2
time 7
But now thats gone. How do i get it back and have it default to whatever section is most closely related to C programming? I seem to remember something about a POSIX, environment variable that made that happen but it would be nice to see what other sections had a time entry
Maybe this provides a hint (unless I misunderstand ?)
user@machine:~> man time
Man: find all matching manual pages (set MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT to avoid this)
* time (1)
time (n)
time (3am)
time (2)
time (7)
time (1p)
time (3p)
Man: What manual page do you want?
Man:
user@machine:~>
Yes, thats what i would expect but i dont get any of that. How can i restore that functionality?
Post the URL you get with susepaste:
cat /etc/manpath.config | susepaste -e 43200
Maybe you have to install susepaste before.
I guess my “hint” was well hidden
The hint was in the output of my “man time” command
i.e., maybe it’s set for your user (?)
From the manpage for man:
MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT
If many man pages are available corresponding to the requested one, man will display them in a list, unless
$MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, in which case the first page in the list will be displayed automatically.
That was it MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT=1
I unset it and now man works as expected
Thanks!
Would you know where that is set?
That’s a good question. Why? Because I’ve never had this issue, because MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT has never been set as default in any of our systems.
This would be an interesting test for you … create a new user account, then log into that user account and open up a command line [window] and execute “man time”. Okay, for that new user, do you see the man page list? Or does it only show the first manpage choice?
Doing that test will tell us if MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT is set globally for all users.
Check your bashrc file in the user directory. It may be set there…
I found it, somehow it got set in my .bashrc
Now if i could get man to choose a default page so any time i typed man it would look first i the C programming man pages
Have you read the manpage for man? i.e.,
:~> man man
I ask because at the top of the man manpage, the Description describes it
DESCRIPTION
man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of a program, utility or
function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed.
A section, if provided, ====> will direct man to look only in that section <==== of the manual.
The default action is to ====> search in all of the available sections <====