Installed
programs: apropos,
makewhatis, man, man2dvi, man2html, and whatis
6.48. Man-1.5p
The Man package contains programs for finding and viewing man pages.
Approximate build
time: 0.1 SBU
Required disk
space: 2.9 MB
Installation depends
on: Bash, Binutils,
Coreutils, Gawk, GCC, Glibc, Grep, Make, and Sed
6.48.1. Installation of Man
Two adjustments need to be made to the sources of Man.
The first is a sed substitution to add the -R switch to the PAGER variable so that escape sequences are properly handled by Less:
sed -i 's@-is@&R@g' configure
The second is also a sed substitution to comment out the “MANPATH /usr/man” line in the man.conf file to prevent redundant results when using programs such as whatis:
sed -i 's@MANPATH./usr/man@#&@g' src/man.conf.in
Prepare Man for compilation:
./configure -confdir=/etc
The meaning of the configure options:
- -confdir=/etc
-
This tells the man program to look for the man.conf configuration file in the /etc directory.
Compile the package:
make
Install the package:
make install
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
If you will be working on a terminal that does not support text attributes such as color and bold, you can disable Select Graphic Rendition (SGR) escape sequences by editing the man.conf file and adding the -c option to the NROFF variable. If you use multiple terminal types for one computer it may be better to selectively add the GROFF_NO_SGR environment variable for the terminals that do not support SGR.
If the character set of the locale uses 8-bit characters, search for the line beginning with “NROFF” in /etc/man.conf, and verify that it matches the following:
NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin1 -mandoc
Note that “latin1” should be used even if it is not the character set of the locale. The reason is that, according to the specification, groff has no means of typesetting characters outside International Organization for Standards (ISO) 8859-1 without some strange escape codes. When formatting man pages, groff thinks that they are in the ISO 8859-1 encoding and this -Tlatin1 switch tells groff to use the same encoding for output. Since groff does no recoding of input characters, the formatted result is really in the same encoding as input, and therefore it is usable as the input for a pager.
This does not solve the problem of a non-working man2dvi program for localized man pages in non-ISO 8859-1 locales. Also, it does not work with multibyte character sets. The first problem does not currently have a solution. The second issue is not of concern because the LFS installation does not support multibyte character sets.
Additional information with regards to the compression of man and info pages can be found in the BLFS book at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/cvs/postlfs/compressdoc.html.