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NAME | DESCRIPTION | FORMAT | BUGS | COLOPHON |
MANPATH(5) /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf MANPATH(5)
manpath - format of the /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf file
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 /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf will not override it.
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 /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf 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.
SECTION section ...
Lines of this form define the order in which manual sections
should be searched. If there are no SECTION directives in the
configuration file, the default is:
SECTION 1 n l 8 3 0 2 5 4 9 6 7
If multiple SECTION directives are given, their section lists
will be concatenated.
If a particular extension is not in this list (say, 1mh) it
will be displayed with the rest of the section it belongs to.
The effect of this is that you only need to explicitly list
extensions if you want to force a particular order. Sections
with extensions should usually be adjacent to their main
section (e.g. "1 1mh 8 ...").
SECTIONS is accepted as an alternative name for this
directive.
MINCATWIDTH width
If the terminal width is less than width, cat pages will not
be created (if missing) or displayed. The default is 80.
MAXCATWIDTH width
If the terminal width is greater than width, cat pages will
not be created (if missing) or displayed. The default is 80.
CATWIDTH width
If width is non-zero, cat pages will always be formatted for a
terminal of the given width, regardless of the width of the
terminal actually being used. This should generally be within
the range set by MINCATWIDTH and MAXCATWIDTH.
NOCACHE
This flag prevents man(1) from creating cat pages
automatically.
Unless the rules above are followed and observed precisely, the
manual pager utilities will not function as desired. The rules are
overly complicated.
This page is part of the man-db (manual pager suite) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/⟩. If you have a bug report for this
manual page, send it to man-db-devel@nongnu.org. This page was
obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨http://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/man-db.git⟩ on 2017-07-05. If you dis‐
cover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
to man-pages@man7.org
2.7.6.1 2016-12-12 MANPATH(5)
Pages that refer to this page: man(1), catman(8), mandb(8)