[wadesworld]

I did an upgrade install of 10.3, and I'm missing some man pages. I'm definitely missing all the exec (execv, execl, etc) man pages in section 3, and I'm missing syslog.conf in section 5.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Wade

[Morgoth]

um, my 10.3 seems to have them available...

...did you make sure to install the BSD-Subsystem?

[wadesworld]

Yes, I installed the BSD subsystem. That's the strange thing - other 10.3 installations have them just fine - but mine doesn't for some reason.

Wade

[Moonray]

Could be that there's some damage in your filesystem?

-

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Originally posted by wadesworld:
I did an upgrade install of 10.3, and I'm missing some man pages. I'm definitely missing all the exec (execv, execl, etc) man pages in section 3, and I'm missing syslog.conf in section 5.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Wade

10.3 should have a lot more man pages than previous revs did.

[mcsjgs]

This is a very vexing problem. There is a related problem of the cron weekly showing a slew of missing man pages in /man3. This is an error in the cron weekly script where it looks for pages in the wrong place. See this thread on Apple:

Missing Man Pages On Apple Unix Discussion

Now I find that even though this is true, there are actual missing man pages and no one knows why. See thread here:

Missing Man Pages Discussion

If anyone has a clue how to solve this problem, I would be grateful.

[Moonray]

The OS X/Darwin manpages have never been complete or all up-to-date corresponding to the programs. Makes me sometimes think that task is not assinged to anyone at Apple.

-

[parsec]

Argh.. just upgraded to panther last night and discovered that I'm missing the man pages.

So I just grabbed Pacifist 1.6 and installed the
/usr/share/man/man3
directory from the
/System/Installation/Packages/BSD.pkg
package on panther install disc 1.

kind of annoying, but seemed to do the trick

[Gary Kerbaugh]

Hi guys,
   I apologize for jumping in here late but I think I can offer a little help. THere are actually two separate issues referenced here. The first is the 25 man pages that are referenced as missing in the weekly script output. These Perl man pages are all softlinks that point to nothing. The problem is the result of Perl's assumption that the filesystem is case sensitive. The original man pages are lower case and the Perl installer creates softlinks with the same name but with some capitalization. Unfortunately on a case insensitive file system, this blows away the original. This actually occured when the installer was created and Pacifist won't help because they are actually missing in the installer. A quick fix is to simply delete the softlinks.

   The second issue occurs only with an upgrade install and results in a much larger list of missing man pages. I have no idea why this occurs because those pages are in the installer but not in a single package. Pacifist is part of the cure but getting a list of missing pages is the first step. Toward this end, I've added a new capability to my pkggrep script. It can now compare a directory's contents and the installer's receipts. This should tell you exactly what's missing. You can download the script at:

http://kerbaugh.uncfsu.edu/pkggrep.tar.gz

The pkggrep script will make this comparison if you simply give it an argument that is a directory. However, it's unable to do it recursively so to verify /usr/share/man, you must run the script with arguments, /usr/share/man/man1, /usr/share/man/man2, /usr/share/man/man3, etc., as separate arguments. Once you have a comprehensive list, use Pacifist to get what you need from the installer.

   This information was composited from two threads at Apple's UNIX Discussion:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...3430@.599c2ca5
http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...3434@.599c0d29

There, you will find some additional details and also a little more on the usage of my script. I admit that my script is poorly documented, which is a result of lack of demand. Naturally I think it's pretty powerful but only at certain times. Anyway, try it also with no argument, to get a usage statement and with a file as an argument. That should give you some idea of how it's used.

[mcsjgs]

Thanks for this very informative and accurate post about the missing man files.

Do you have any idea why I cannot delete the 25 offending files in /man3?

I get this error message:

-120 dirNFErr Directory not found

This error message from Finder, File Buddy 7 both.

Is there a Unix supertrash command to get rid of them?

Nothing wrong with my directories according to fsck or Diskwarrior 3 from CD. Baffling.

==================

Edited later.

Finally found the joys of using the

sudo rm -r

command and dragging the 25 non-files into terminal. Now no more spurious whatis database rebuilds. Thank you.