TITLE: Extended MAN Pages.

PROBLEM:

I added a .MacOSX/environment.plist file as seen below and indeed the new MAN pages appear in Safari but the old MAN pages (i.e. ps, ls, pwd...etc) can not be found. I thought the entry $MANPATH would take care of that (like in the BASH shell environment) but I guess not. Do I have to list ALL the original MAN paths manually in the environment.plist? Or am I using $MANPATH improperly? Any ideas?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
     <key>MANPATH</key>
     <string>$MANPATH:/usr/local/mysql/man:/opt/local/man:/usr/X11R6/man</string>
</dict>
</plist>

RESPONSE:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The man man page (no I didn't stutter) states that the MANPATH environment variable overrides the default search path, so yes you do need to include all search paths you want man to look for. The "$MANPATH" above does not get expanded by Apple's method. The man man page also states that the default search path is set up in "/usr/share/misc/man.conf". This contains "/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man" in my installation of OS X Tiger.

SOLUTION:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
     <key>MANPATH</key>
     <string>/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/mysql/man:/opt/local/man</string>
</dict>
</plist>

STATUS: CLOSED 31-Dec-2005