Re: [Man-db-devel] Listing all man pages on the MANPATH

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 03:49:18PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> I'm working on a fuzzy search tool that accepts choices on stdin and prints
> the selected one on stdout. I want to use this tool to search for man pages
> on my MANPATH to then display them using man(1).
> 
> To accomplish this, I have to find a way of listing all man pages on the
> MANPATH and I think the fastest way of doing so would be to use the mandb.

Indeed.

> I have been able to accomplish almost exactly what I want using
> `apropos -l .`. The only remaining problem is that apropos(1) will truncate
> the names of man pages if they are really long (even though the -l flag is
> used).
> 
> Is there a way of getting around this? It does not look like that from the
> source.

This is a bug, thanks.  I've fixed it for the next release:

  
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=879043ba1ea489baebd22674e3adf7652ec78d6b

> I have tried to get man-db to build on my system in order to change the
> behavior of apropos(1) to my liking but I'm running in to errors. After
> running:
> 
> ./autogen.sh
> ./configure
> 
> `make` will fail with the following error:
> 
> Making all in gnulib/po
> make[2]: Entering directory '/home/calleerlandsson/Projects/man-db/gnulib/po'
> make[2]: *** No rule to make target 'all'.  Stop.
> make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/calleerlandsson/Projects/man-db/gnulib/po'
> Makefile:1509: recipe for target 'all-recursive' failed
> make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/calleerlandsson/Projects/man-db'
> Makefile:1436: recipe for target 'all' failed
> make: *** [all] Error 2

You need to have gnulib installed.  If you're using Debian or a
derivative, you can install the "gnulib" package; otherwise checking out
git://git.savannah.gnu.org/gnulib.git and arranging for gnulib-tool to
be on your path should do well enough.  I should really make this easier
at some point though ...

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden