Recipe 1.6. Configuring Your manpath
1.6.1 Problem
You're repeatedly
having trouble finding man pages; using tools from Recipe 1.4, you
find that most of the missing pages are in a directory that
man doesn't seem to know about.
Perhaps a newly-installed program put its man pages in a strange
place, like /opt/man. Or perhaps you want to put
some man pages in a nonstandard location. How do you configure
man to find them?
1.6.2 Solution
Edit /etc/manpath.config.
Suppose the directory you want to add is
/opt/man. Add /opt/man to
/etc/manpath.config:
# every automatically generated MANPATH includes
# these fields
MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/man
MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/share/man
MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/X11R6/man
MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/local/man
MANDATORY_MANPATH /opt/man
And you're done. Now man will
find the man pages in the new directory.
When you create a custom man page directory, be sure to include the
section directories:
$ ls /opt/man/local
man1 man2 man3 man4 man5 man6 man7 man8 man9
It's not necessary to include all the numbered
sections, just the ones pertinent to the man pages
you'll be storing there.
If you're going to have subdirectories—for
example, /opt/man and
/opt/man/local—be sure to list them in
this order:
MANDATORY_MANPATH /opt/man/local
MANDATORY_MANPATH /opt/man
Subdirectories must be listed before parent directories, or they will
be overlooked by the man viewer.
1.6.3 Discussion
You can run manpath with no options to see your current
manpaths:
$ manpath
/usr/local/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/man
1.6.4 See Also
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