The manpath configuration file is used by the manual page utilities
to assess users' manpaths at run time, to indicate which manual page
hierarchies (manpaths) are to be treated as system hierarchies and to
assign them directories to be used for storing cat files.
If the environment variable
$MANPATH
is already set, the information contained within /etc/manpath.config will
not override it.
FORMAT
The following field types are currently recognised:
# comment
Blank lines or those beginning with a
#
will be treated as comments and ignored.
MANDATORY_MANPATH manpath_element
Lines of this form indicate manpaths that every automatically generated
$MANPATH
should contain.
This will typically include
/usr/man.
MANPATH_MAP path_element manpath_element
Lines of this form set up
$PATH
to
$MANPATH
mappings.
For each
path_element
found in the user's
$PATH,
manpath_element
will be added to the
$MANPATH.
MANDB_MAP manpath_element [ catpath_element ]
Lines of this form indicate which manpaths are to be treated as system
manpaths, and optionally where their cat files should be stored.
This field type is particularly important if
man
is a setuid program, as (when in the system configuration file
/etc/manpath.config rather than the per-user configuration file .manpath)
it indicates which manual page hierarchies to access as the setuid user and
which as the invoking user.
The system manual page hierarchies are usually those stored under
/usr
such as
/usr/man,
/usr/local/man
and
/usr/X11R6/man.
If cat pages from a particular
manpath_element
are not to be stored or are to be stored in the traditional location,
catpath_element
may be omitted.
Traditional cat placement would be impossible for read only mounted manual
page hierarchies and because of this it is possible to specify any valid
directory hierarchy for their storage.
To observe the
Linux FSSTND
the keyword
`FSSTND
can be used in place of an actual directory.
Unfortunately, it is necessary to specify
all
system man tree paths, including alternate operating system paths such as
/usr/man/sun
and any
NLS locale
paths such as
/usr/man/de_DE.88591.
As the information is parsed line by line in the order written, it is
necessary for any manpath that is a sub-hierarchy of another hierarchy to be
listed first, otherwise an incorrect match will be made.
An example is that
/usr/man/de_DE.88591
must come before
/usr/man.
DEFINE key value
Lines of this form define miscellaneous configuration variables; see the
default configuration file for those variables used by the manual pager
utilities.
They include default paths to various programs (such as
grep
and
tbl),
and default sets of arguments to those programs.
BUGS
Unless the rules above are followed and observed precisely, the manual pager
utilities will not function as desired.
The rules are overly complicated.