[OS X TeX] MacTeX installer and man pages
Justin C. Walker
justin at mac.com
Fri Jul 21 13:17:39 EDT 2006
On Jul 21, 2006, at 09:59 , Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
> On Jul 21, 2006, at 11:50 AM, Justin C. Walker wrote:
>> Just a followup (should have said it explicitly in my previous
>> response): I would consider modifying 'man.conf' (at least on
>> later versions of Mac OS X), rather than relying on MANPATH; I use
>> the latter only for testing and quick checks. The former is the
>> preferred means to configure the 'man' command.
>>
> Can you elaborate on that a bit? I am far from a Unix expert, but
> it was my understanding that it's situations like this that
> environment variables are good for. It just seems to me weird that
> after using the path in MANPATH and not finding any matches, man
> wouldn't go on to try the method specified by man.conf.
> I am just curious what the reason, if any, behind it is, if anyone
> knows.
The strategy is pretty much laid out for you in the man page for
'man'. I will guess that the reason for the behavior you see is the
idea of "overriding":
- command line arguments (-M) overrides everything
- If no "-M", use MANPATH
- None of the above, use "man.conf"
I think trying to make sense of conflicting directions given by the
above is fairly difficult, so the easy-to-implement, as well as easy-
to-explain, choice is the hierarchy approach, without merging.
Cheers,
Justin
--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large
Institute for the Absorption of Federal Funds
--------
Men are from Earth.
Women are from Earth.
Deal with it.
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