Monday, September 15, 2014

Installing POSIX Man Pages on Ubuntu

I was fairly surprised to find that $ man jobs didn't work on Ubuntu 14.04.  When I looked at the installed man pages, I realized that the sections 1, 6, and 8 of the UNIX manual pages were missing.  These correspond to the user commands, games, and system admin commands.  I was able to install the man pages with:

 $ sudo apt-get install manpages-posix

This made me wonder if the current group of Linux users were using basic UNIX commands like fg, bg, jobs.  I then realized that the full set of document was available with info.  Many years ago, the man pages were in better shape then the info pages.  I now see that there's more documentation in info.  Despite being a heavy user of Emacs, I've never really warmed to the navigation commands in info and prefer the interface for less and man.  I'll give info another try over the next few months.


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