> : I have a manual page directory /usr/man/ with subdirectories man1/
> : man2/ ... cat1/ cat2/ ...
> : If I have a file "manpage.1" in man1/ and I type "man manpage", I get
> : the manpage, but when I'm finished, a "manpage.1.gz" mysteriously
> : appears in cat1/ without me asking for it. What is it for and why is
> : it there?
> : Related, where _should_ I put all my manpage files, given that I would
> : like them all gzipped?
> I've been having problems along the same lines. One thing I noticed was
> that you do seem to need to have groff installed to view some of the man
> pages. In spite of something saying you don't have to have it just to
> read preformatted manpages.
> I currently have a few man pages which just show up blank when you try to
> view them. Example: man openwin. I do have the directory in the
> manpath, and am able to read other pages in the directory, but not this one.
Under a given */man directory, you will find oodles of directories,
named (more or less) man[1-9] and cat[1-9]. Under man/man? you will
find raw groff (or nroff or troff---I don't know the difference) code
for the manpages. *roff is a document language system similar to TeX.
All the highlights and other fancy things can be entered as text,
local macros defined and so forth.
When you call man foo, the man command searches the directories in
$MANPATH, searching first under the cat directories for entries.
Under cat?, you find the (optionally gnuzipped) text files which have
already been formatted by groff. That is, *man/cat1/foo.1 can be seen
directly through less, more or and hence, I suppose, the name) cat.
Unless you can think of a good reason to keep them, you probably do
not need the groff versions of the man pages which have already been
formatted. I, in fact, do not even have groff on my machine---I
ported my unformatted man pages over to a friend's Linux box, ran a
shell script to format them, and then brought the man/cat?/* files
back. Now have manpages. As man ships to an arbitrary $PAGER,
something like zmore or zless can be used such that the cat-pages may
be kept in compressed format.
This is probably more than you really cared to hear about man pages,
right? :-)
CJW
--
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/\ Colin J. Wynne Washington and Lee University
(()) Lexington, *ia
/______\
/________\ Be an equal opportunity employer:
Hire the morally handicapped.
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