Problem with man pages

[mlkeithley]

Hello group,

I've installed slackware 15.0 on a 32-bit machine with 8 GB of memory.

Everything works as expected except that the apropo section of the man
facility doesnt display anything. if I use
man -k
I always get "nothing approrpiate."
This dispite the fact that I should get something!

I used the pkgtool to remove packages with "man" in their
title, expecting that man pages would not display. They still do!

I restored the packages and nothing changed.

Can someone tell me what I might try now?

Many thanks.

[Henrik Carlqvist]

if I use man -k I always get "nothing approrpiate."

In my experience "man -k" works fine on Slackware 15.0. Do you have a
full install of Slackware 15.0?

regards Henrik

[Mike Keithley]

Yes I specified a full installation and had no indication of errors.

But I didn't know about the cron update feature and it appears
that my computer just wasn't running at update time.

I ran the update-db script and got the database updated in about 10
minutes. I saw several parsing errors
but the final output sugesded that bad entries were either purged or
fixed.

The bottom line is that the man -k works fine now. I've got some
reading to appreciate how cron works!


Many thanks.

Post by Henrik Carlqvist

if I use man -k I always get "nothing approrpiate."

In my experience "man -k" works fine on Slackware 15.0. Do you have a
full install of Slackware 15.0?
regards Henrik

[Petri Kaukasoina]

Post by mlkeithley
Everything works as expected except that the apropo section of the man
facility doesnt display anything. if I use
man -k
I always get "nothing approrpiate."

cron runs daily jobs at 4:40 every night. /etc/cron.daily/man-db then
creates the databases used for whatis and apropos. Maybe you have never left
the computer running over night?

[Mike Keithley]

Post by Petri Kaukasoina

Post by mlkeithley
Everything works as expected except that the apropo section of the man
facility doesnt display anything. if I use
man -k
I always get "nothing approrpiate."

cron runs daily jobs at 4:40 every night. /etc/cron.daily/man-db then
creates the databases used for whatis and apropos. Maybe you have never left
the computer running over night?

that's it, never thought to do that.

[John McCue]

<snip>

Post by Mike Keithley
that's it, never thought to do that.

FWIW, it is OK to reschedule these daily jobs at a
different time. On my Slackware workstation, I have
the jobs scheduled at dinner time :)

That is the beauty of Slackware, you can have things do
what you want and when you want.