problem with apropos and whatis commands

by g, Saturday, November 19, 2022, 09:58 (616 days ago) @ rosika

Hello, rosika,

This time I got a little more into the situation, here's:

There is installed 'syslogd' and 'klogd' programs from Sysklogd 1.5.1 package in the peropesis filesystem. These programs log system messages. As specified in the '/etc/syslog.conf' file, system messages are logged in files that are created in the '/var/log' directory. Unfortunately, program 'mandb' does not offer logging of its messages. You can check:

'ls /var/log'

Logs can be read with programs cat and less: 'cat /var/log/file-name.log | less' (when you're finished, write 'q')

So in this case you should focus on the message provided by the 'mandb' program:

Processing manual pages under /usr/man...
/usr/bin/mandb: can´t update index cache /var/cache/man/fsstnd/336: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/mandb: warning: cannot create catdir /var/cache/man/fsstnd
/usr/bin/mandb: can´t create index cache /var/cache/man/fsstnd/336: No such file or directory

I forgot to mention, that 'mandb' follows the settings described in the '/etc/man_db.conf' file. When you open this file with command: 'cat -n /etc/man_db.conf', you can see that line 66 also describes this '/var/cache/man/fsstnd/' directory. Above in this config file explains what this is for: "Each line may have an optional extra string indicating the catpath associated with the manpath". At this point it should be added, that all man pages is keeping in the /usr/share/man diretory in the peropesis filesystem. What if we try to comment this line? The 'ed' text editor can be used for this task. Example:

# ed /etc/man_db.conf
5186
66
MANDB_MAP /usr/man /var/cache/man/fsstnd
c
#MANDB_MAP /usr/man /var/cache/man/fsstnd
.
w
5142
q

After these actions, you can check (with 'cat', 'less') whether you succeeded in changing the content of the file in the desired location. And what if we tried to run the 'mandb' program after all that and then start programs 'whatis' and 'apropos'?