Question about /usr/ucb/man -P option

[Melanie Anderson]

peirce at gumby.cc.wmich.edu (Leonard Peirce) writes:

>In article <268F712E.9253 at orion.oac.uci.edu> iglesias at orion.oac.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) writes:
>>In article <12989 at cbmvax.commodore.com> grr at cbmvax (George Robbins) writes:
>>>Have you considered using symlinks to make your man directory show up as
>>>/usr/man/manx?  This works for us, although it seems to require that the
>>>suffixes on the man entries match the subdirectory to some extent...
>> [...]
>>                                               Sun's man has a -M
>>option to set the man path, so as part of the Sun executable library we
>>have a shell script called 'man' that does a 'man -M path:path2 ...'.
>>Users put the library executable path before /usr/ucb and it all works.

>Or even better, you can just set the MANPATH environment variable and
>achieve the same results.

>The man command and related programs that come with ULTRIX are admittedly
>poor.  I took a copy of the 4.3 man and made a few small hacks so that it
>will work with ULTRIX.  I also added code for a default MANPATH so if some-
>forgets to set it, they will still pick up both the ULTRIX man pages and our
>local stuff.

>At USENIX in January, I was told by someone in the ULTRIX development group
>that 4.0 will support alternate search paths.  But I'm not holding my breath.
>--
>Leonard Peirce                  Internet:  peirce at gumby.cc.wmich.edu
>Western Michigan University                peirce at gw.wmich.edu
>Academic Computer Center        UUCP:      ...!uunet!sharkey!wmichgw!peirce
>Kalamazoo, MI  49008            Phone:     (616) 387-5469

yes indeed, ultrix 4.0 includes /usr/bin/man (old-style ultrix man) and
/usr/ucb/man which is the bsd-style man and it does indeed have a -P option
that does indeed acutally work. 

don't ask how i know this.

melanie anderson
beckman institute at the unversity of illinois
msa at uiuc.edu