man page suffixes?

[Tom Christiansen]

In article <1990Nov21.230907.1873 at unixg.ubc.ca> lindholm at cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (George Lindholm) writes:
|I'm trying to isolate the X commands man pages by appending an X to the man
|file (eg. xterm.1X). According the to the man man page this should work (and
|we do have man files ending in v and g that man can find.). But when
|I do this man can no longer find the file. Is there something else that needs
|to be changed? Or are there a few suffixes hard-coded into man? Thanks

You've not said which flavor of UNIX you're running, but very often the
answer is "yes".  The sections, subsections, directories, and man trees
are often all or mostly hard-wired in.

If you'd like a man program that can work equally well (and in essentially
constant time) irrespective of the number or naming scheme or locations
of the man pages you have on your systems, I've written such a beast.
It was described at the last USENIX LISA Conference in Colorado.

Other features include DBM storage of the whatis databases, indexing of
long man pages, user-definable MANPATH and MANSECT variables, and a 
whole bunch more.  Check out the paper and the man page if you're interested.

You may FTP this from tut.cis.ohio-state.edu:perl/scripts/tchrist/man/*,
or you may send me mail, and I'll send you a very slightly more up-to-date
version of it as a compressed and btoa'd tarchive.  It includes a new
makewhatis and catman, documentation for them, the troff source for the
paper, and a bit of other miscellaneous stuff. (The misc stuff is mostly
what you don't get from tut.)

--tom