Ask Ubuntu Asked by Flimm on December 17, 2020
How do I install a man page file system-wide?
For example, if I have a man page file examplecommand.1
, how do I install it so that I can just type man examplecommand
to view it?
First, find out which section your man page belongs to. If its a command, it probably belongs to section 1
. You can read the manpage for the man
command to see a description of the different sections and their corresponding numbers.
Copy your man page to /usr/local/share/man/man1/
(change 1
to your section number if need be). You can also install it to /usr/share/man/man1/
, but it's best practise to use the local
directory for files that are installed without using the APT package manager:
sudo cp examplecommand.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
Run the mandb
command. This will update man
's internal database:
sudo mandb
That's it! You should be able to view the man page by running:
man 1 examplecommand
man
command mandb
command /usr/bin/dh_installman
if you can read Perl, installed with the debhelper
package.Correct answer by Flimm on December 17, 2020
For an application binary that was copied to ~/.local/bin
, copying its .1
man file to ~/.local/share/man/man1
worked for me on Ubuntu 18.04. I had to create the latter directory. I can now access the man page using man <app_name>
.
Answered by Acumenus on December 17, 2020
The answer by @ntc2 above is the one people should be looking at. I wanted to add some extra commentary which didn't fit in the comments section:
The approach by @ntc2 provides a path for people only needing to set their PATH (which they already expect) for local binaries.
However, I don't think the generic mapping <path>/bin
-> <path>/share/man
exists for all paths in $PATH
. It seems like this specific mapping is avoided when the $PATH
in question is $HOME/bin
. When performing strace(1) on man
with MANPATH=:/nonexistingdir
, I see the following lookups:
For any element in $PATH
that's not $HOME/bin
<path>/bin
-> <path>/man
<path>/bin
-> <path>/bin/man
<path>/bin
-> <path>/share/man
<path>/bin
-> <path>/bin/share/man
For $HOME/bin
$HOME/bin
-> $HOME/man
I have no idea why it skips the others. This is on a Debian Buster system. It may be different on other systems.
For me, this means that the safest path to install man-pages is <path>/man
, as it's guaranteed to be found if it's in the $PATH
.
Answered by Aktau on December 17, 2020
If you only need to install the man page locally :
If MANPATH
is unset, or includes an empty component (i.e. starts with :
, ends with :
, or contains ::
), then <path>/share/man
will automatically be searched for man pages whenever <path>/bin
is part of PATH
, for all values of <path>
.
This provides a very simple way to add man pages for locally installed software. There are some details in man manpath
and /etc/manpath.config
, but I don't see any mention of the generic mapping from <path>/bin
to <path>/share/man
.
Answered by ntc2 on December 17, 2020
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