My original query:
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I'm trying to find an easy, transparent way to make local manual pages
available to everyone at our institute. Currently, they are in a NFS
volume, mounted as /usr/local/man. The problem is that most users don't
have MANPATH set, so when they issue a man command, only /usr/share/man
is searched.
I'd really, really like a network-wide solution that doesn't involve
changing things on each machine used for logins.
We have people here who use csh, tcsh, ksh, and bash, so I'd rather not
edit 2 or 3 shell initialization files on each login-server to add a
MANPATH.
I'd rather keep the local pages in a separate hierarchy than the Sun
distribution.
It would be ideal if the man.cf file in /usr/share/man allowed you to
specify additional hierarchies, not just the order of suffixs
(directories) within the current tree to search.
I'm considering replacing /usr/bin/man on each login machine with a
shell script that appends /usr/local/man to the MANPATH (if it's not
already set), and then calls the real binary. Can anyone think of a
cleaner solution?
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The answers:
Jacques Rall <jacques.rall@za.eds.com>
root@wisdom.maf.nasa.gov (Mark Hargrave)
bbrown@daffy.sna.com (Barry Brown)
peter.bestel@uniq.com.au (Peter Bestel)
Various suggestions involving system or user
.chsrc/.login/.profile files.
These really aren't acceptable. There's no easy way of
modifying the current startup files that each individual uses
here. Since 5 different shells (include /bin/sh) are involved
on each login machine, modifying the system startup files is no
fun either.
If I was designing a new installation, I'd certainly use a
scheme whereby each user's startup file calls a local
system file for local modifications. In fact, I'd probably
make that local file something in perl that uses a template
of enviroment settings, passing the correct syntax back to
the calling shell.
Karl E. Vogel <vogelke@c17.wpafb.af.mil>
Anthony.Worrall@reading.ac.uk (Anthony Worrall)
Both suggested supplying the man pages as html documents.
A nice idea, but not appropriate for our environment. As
much as I like the look of man pages via a browser, as an
admin they lack the ease of displaying them in a login
session, redirecting the output to a file, etc.
jafar@finance.capital.ge.com (Jafar Shameem)
Rich Kulawiec <rsk@itw.com>
Both suggested shell wrappers to /usr/bin/man.
Rich Kulawiec pointed out that not only would a wrapper be
shell independent, but if well written, it could be OS (Solaris
v. SunOS) independent as well.
Erick Cede <erickc@sonitel.com>
A nice scheme about linking each directory in /usr/local/man
to a directory in /usr/share/man, and modifying
/usr/share/man/man.cf.
I like this idea a lot. It avoids re-naming system binaries,
is shell independent, and means less to change after patch
installations or OS upgrades (if they change /usr/bin/man).
This also has the advantage that nothing on each login
machine needs to be changed "back" when I move their local
man pages onto the same NFS server that's serving the
/usr/local/man tree.
---- Mark Bergman bergman@phri.nyu.edu System and Network Administrator 212-578-0822 Public Health Research Institute Rm. 1074, 455 1st Ave, NY NY, 10016
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