Unix Newbie

[Kok-Yong Tan]

On Feb 12, 2008, at 01:49, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> Don't forget to Reply All so your message goes to the list too, not  
> just to me.
>
> On Feb 11, 2008, at 19:08, Peter Hindrichs wrote:
>
>> I did as you suggested and that has worked fine.  My MANPATH Line  
>> now looks like this:
>>
>> MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/ 
>> usr/X11/man
>> The text after man:/ do I need to delete this or can I leave it in  
>> the line.?
>
> MANPATH, like PATH, is a colon-separated list. In this case, it's a  
> list of places where the "man" program looks for manual pages. So  
> you probably want all of those places that you have listed, so that  
> "man" can find all manuals, not just those for software installed  
> by MacPorts in /opt/local.


Something to note is that Unix scans from left to right in the PATH  
and MANPATH variables and stops searching at the first "hit" so if  
you have identically-named files in multiple directory structures, it  
will only find the first one.  e.g., if you have two files named  
"foo" in /opt/local/bin/foo and /user/local/bin/foo, only the foo in / 
opt/local/bin/foo will be referenced if /opt/local/bin precedes /usr/ 
local/bin in the PATH or MANPATH variable when scanning the  
environment variable from left to right.  FYI.
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