I have come across a strange issue where I've installed a program (texlive 2018) on an NFS share and now I'm trying to add its man pages to my MANPATH. No matter what I try, I'm unable to get this to work. I keep getting errors.

I'm certain that I'm modifying the MANPATH OK, e.g., it looks like If I simply type I get but I know it's there. If I try I get But, the permissions match those of the man pages in I'm at a loss. If I copy the same man page to and run all works as expected. I've had no luck finding help on the internet about this but I have a hard time believing others haven't experienced this before.

This problem is on Kubuntu 18.04, and I've tried this as a 'normal' user on machines with 'no_root_squash' and 'root_squash' enabled on the NFS side.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers!

Whoops! makewhatis has been superseded by mandb. Read the mandb page to make sure you run it right. makewhatis ignored manpath so one had to specify what additional directories had to be searched.

Make sure the access controls to the NFS mount permit reading. This would include a mount including read, and world access to the files is read (which you likely do have).

With NFS you might also check how anonymous uses access the files (sometimes this is disabled) - this can affect access if the user doesn't have an account on the NFS server. This causes the UID to be mapped to "nfsnobody" or "nobody" (depending on how the server is configured). IF nobody/nfsnobody has no access then it would be unable to read the files.

This can appear confusing depending on how the file was copied to /tmp (as in "no root squash" option)

I'd kind of be thinking the share permissions too but looking at first reply makes me think manpath issue.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/manpath.5.html

Or move man files to default location.

and/or move the new manpath to the front of the "line"...?

my (OSx) version of says
"If you don't specify -M but set the MANPATH environment variable, the value of that variable is the list of the directories that man searches."

Yours may similarly be affected.
is where I'd start.

Can you cat the file?

> makewhatis has been superseded by mandb

that's not true. he can use whichever he likes

my debt has superceeded your debt right?

MAKEWHATIS(8) BSD System Manager's Manual MAKEWHATIS(8)

NAME
makewhatis -- create whatis database

SYNOPSIS
makewhatis [-a] [-i column] [-n name] [-o file] [-v] [-L]
[directories ...]

------------------

the newest Apple High Sierra has makewhatis (their version was not copylefted and renamed, controlled by who copylefted it by trying to coerce others to use it)

/usr/src/man-1.5p/src/makewhatis

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/util...an-1.5p.tar.gz

----------------------

you will always hear from certain distros that their version is the "right version" and others they don't (yet) control are "depreciated" or dumb. don't believe it.

while many gnu or gpl software copyleft and are clean: there are some definite actors out there who heist software, try to eliminate the original author work, tamper with software, and insure software is in all linux OS releases without (hardly) a choice other than to use it

He can use whatever he has. You went on to cite BSD. This is a Linux forum. Do you know of a Linux distribution that still has makewhatis?

All,

Thanks for all the updates, I've been busy and haven't had time to really dig back into this. For what it's worth, I'm running Kubuntu 18.04 and makewhatis is not installed on the workstation.

I'm not sure I follow completely how this is meant to work, but I believe that my MANPATH is correct, and that man is supposed to use it if it exists and fail back on other methods if it doesn't. Am I misunderstanding this? Do I need to do something with mandb (or anything else) after modifying the MANPATH in order for it work the way I expect it to?

Even if I run I still get Adding the -d flag results in the following

I can however, cat the man pages without any issues so I don't understand the permission error.

For what it's worth, returns nothing.

As far as NFS is concerned, I'm not sure what to check here. If I, as the user running man, have permission to cat the file, shouldn't man work? Unless it runs as a different user for some reason.

One other thing that a colleague of mine noticed that may be relevant here, if we start by running and traverse up the directory tree, we get errors until we get to where the message changes to Is this a lead? This same colleague wrote a small C program that issues the same call that generates the "Stale file handle" message in man (after digging around with strace) and his program successfully completes the call. Below is the strace line with the error: Does anybody have any ideas about this? I'm still at a loss. Thanks a ton for your time and help.

Then it begins to look like permissions for some group or user.

I don't follow though, if my user (me) can cat the file shouldn't the same user (again, me) be able to access the page with man? Maybe I'm missing something about the way man works, does it not run as the same user who calls it?

Yes.

Unless the sticky bit is set; it isn't on man on my computer.

Edit mandb.conf to add the directories you want mandb to index, then run mandb. If it doesn't solve your problem it may report problems with the man pages.

Examine the mount point with
If this says "stale" then try to remount

Normally the answer is "yes".

NFS provides a user id/group mapping though, and if an entry is missing, it gets mapped to "nobody" (or "NFSnobody" depending on configurations). That "nobody"/"NFSnobody" can be mapped to mean "no access".

But being able to cat the file SHOULD mean man can read it. At that point it depends on the MANPATH environment variable, and local configurations. You can check some of that with the -w and or -W options (one prints the locations of the nroff files, the other prints the locations of the cat file versions).

You can also check the file /etc/man_db.conf for locations.

The other POSSIBLE issues is how the pager works... that is a separate program - and it may be having problems. The default utility is "less", but it depends on the input as to what it can do (it doesn't format - just displays text, so it is possible for the content reference to point to a file that doesn't exist, but the source may.)

You can test that by using "-P cat". This would look like the cat of the file that is to be used. NOTE, this file has been processed from raw man pages (which has formatting macros built in), which is the source to man (which formats it). The "catman" files have been "preformatted" - and are not the original files (like the one you used cat to display).

The error message is from "man", not from the pager program. So the error may not be from the original file, though that is the file "man" has for a reference.

(edit output of man -d already posted)