I recently have become curious with Illumos distributions, at the present time, OmniOS. One thing I've come to expect is being able to simply type "man ls" for example to figure out how to use system tools. However, running man on OmniOS has provided nothing, nor does it seem to be available
~ � which man man: aliased to nocorrect man
However, the above behavior only happens in zsh, where with sh I get an actual path:
user@omni:~$ which man /usr/bin/man
Is there a different command or something? Every time I try to search for the manual for a command I always get "No manual entry for <command>". I've tried both in zsh and sh using man and man -s to check different sections
On many implementations, the manual pages are an optional package that needs to be loaded to make the man pages available to the man command. Most system administrators are nice enough to load the man pages so everyone can reference the manuals for your system.
From the diagnostics you're getting from man when invoked by sh , it sounds like the man utility is present, but the database of manual pages it searches has not been loaded.
You're right that they're there....I guess I now see that searching man pages is a bit more evil than I realized. I can't simply type "man", I have to go:
man -M /usr/share/man <command>
That brings up the man pages for what I need. There's also a pkgsrc man option available that I am yet to learn, but this is something that I didn't find to be well spelled out anywhere. An example is neatly tucked away in the "Debugging offline" section of the GeneralAdministration section on the OmniOS website. Nothing else alluding to that.
You can easily fix that issue by setting the MANPATH variable in the configuration file of your shell (.profile, .bash_profile or whatever), something like:
export MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/opt/omni/share/man:/opt/omni/man
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Thanks you for that info! That makes it much easier than having to specify the path each time