Manual pages located in NON-STANDARD places in Ultrix

[George Robbins]

In article <1991Jun10.214332.11539 at leland.Stanford.EDU> rsingh at elaine4.Stanford.EDU (Rajesh Kumar Singh) writes:
> 
> My question is about MANPATH under ultrix (on two different
> machines).
> 
> How do I access man pages stored in non-standard places, such
> as $HOME/man/man[1-8n]/*  or ~friend/man/man[1-8n]/*  or
> /afs/... ?  From the above syntax it is clear that ultrix man
> displayer doesn't read the MANPATH environment variable, as
> with SunOS, for example?
> 
> Only one consultant pointed out a (seemingly undocumented) swith
> -P <dir>.  The trouble is it doesn't take an argument like
> -P <dir1>:<dir2>:... like most other path specifications.

The Ultrix man program is quite antiquated.  It will search a limited and
poorly specified set of subdirectories (at least [12345678lno]).  On my system
/usr/man/manl and /usr/man/man are symbolic links to /usr/local/man/manl,
etc, to allow segregating the local manual pages from those distributed
with Ultrix.  Unfortunatly, this means modifying the installtion scripts
of most packages that expect to drop their cruft into the system 1-8 manual
sections.

You could create a csh alias or /local/bin script for man that does
"man -Pwhatever "$*" || man "$*", or install one of the various "man"
replacemnts that have been posted in the source groups.

Also, the versions of the Berkely man command in the Tahoe and Reno sources
are redistributable so you could use/install either of them.  The Tahoe verion
is probably the better, since it more or less compatible with the Sun and
similar versions.  The Reno version is more flexible in some ways, but expects
*all* manual pages to to be preformatted and have a ".0" suffix, which is
incompatible with previous (i.e. Ultrix) notions.

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,     uucp:   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing:   domain: grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department     phone:  215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)