Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20021023081517.01fdfd78@pop3.cris.com> X-Sender: rrschulz AT pop3 DOT cris DOT com Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 09:01:39 -0700 To: cygwin From: Randall R Schulz Subject: Procps Man Page & Bad Output From Apropos / Man -k Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Hi, Recently I've noticed that certain invocations of "apropos" or "man -k" (many of them, in fact) include a huge blob of text instead of a proper synopsis line. The man page whose content appears blobified in the apropos output is the "procps" manual page, which for some reason (probably something to do with the "Quick hack conversion" by Mr. Cahalan) is pre-formatted: -==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==- .\" Man page for ps. .\" Quick hack conversion by Albert Cahalan, 1998. .\" Licensed under version 2 of the Gnu General Public License. .\" .\" This man page is a horrid hack because *roff sucks. .\" The whole system is way obsolete. The internal header .\" stuff must die, and will when I figure out how to kill it. .\" I've already killed the wasteful left margin and screwy .\" old perfect justification. Gross! You'd think someone .\" invented this crap in 1973. Oh yeah, they did. Sorry. .\" .TH PS 1 "July 5, 1998" "Linux" "Linux User's Manual" .SH \fRNAME\fR ps \- report process status .ad r .na .ss 12 0 .in 0 .nh .nf SYNOPSIS ps [options] DESCRIPTION ps gives a snapshot of the current processes. If you want ... -==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==- Apparently apropos and "man -k" don't tolerate this, though "whatis ps" is not upset. I've rebuilt the whatis database, of course, and looking at it directly ("/usr/man/whatis") shows that it does not contain the blob (though some entries span multiple lines, for some reason, and others look spurious). Another odd thing I just noticed is that all apropos output, whether correct or not, with our without spurious inclusions, is repeated. Here's a short one: % apropos benchmark Benchmark (3) - benchmark running times of Perl code Benchmark (3pm) - benchmark running times of Perl code ab (8) - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool Benchmark (3) - benchmark running times of Perl code Benchmark (3pm) - benchmark running times of Perl code ab (8) - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool I tend to doubt this is connected with the props blob, but I suppose it could be. Lastly, when I run "makewhatis," I get these diagnostics: % makewhatis Read file error: ./iniomega.1 No such file or directory Read file error: ./lambda.1 No such file or directory Read file error: ./viromega.1 No such file or directory Oh, yeah. I demand that someone fix this. My sensibilities are offended, and this will not stand. Randy -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/