6.16. Installing Man-1.5i2

Estimated build time:           1 minute
Estimated required disk space:  1 MB

6.16.1. Installation of Man

Run the following commands to install man:

for i in configure src/Makefile.in src/makewhatis.sh
do
   cp $i $i.backup &&
   sed 's/gawk/awk/g' $i > tmp~ &&
   mv tmp~ $i
done &&
chmod 755 configure &&
./configure -default &&
make &&
make install

You may want to take a look at the man hint at http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/man.txt which deals with formatting and compression issues for man pages.

6.16.2. Command explanations

for ... sed ... done: This construct changes man so that it uses awk instead of gawk which is the default. We use this as LFS uses awk instead of gawk.

6.16.3. Contents

The Man package contains the man, apropos whatis and makewhatis programs.

6.16.4. Description

6.16.4.1. man

man formats and displays the on-line manual pages.

6.16.4.2. apropos

apropos searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard output.

6.16.4.3. whatis

whatis searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard output. Only complete word matches are displayed.

6.16.4.4. makewhatis

makewhatis reads all the manual pages contained in given sections of manpath or the pre-formatted pages contained in the given sections of catpath. For each page, it writes a line in the whatis database; each line consists of the name of the page and a short description, separated by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of the NAME section of the manual page.

6.16.5. Dependencies

Man-1.5i2 needs the following to be installed:


sh from the bash package

as from the binutils package
ld from the binutils package

bzip2 from the bzip2 package

chmod from the fileutils package
cp from the fileutils package
install from the fileutils package
mkdir from the fileutils package
mv from the fileutils package
rm from the fileutils package

gcc from the gcc package

grep from the grep package

gunzip from the gzip package
zcat from the gzip package

make from the make package

awk from the mawk package

sed from the sed package

echo from the sh-utils package
cat from the textutils package