Indexing your man pages

Anton Parol — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:49:48 +0000

Its not as boring as you think, but you’ll HAVE to do it when you don’t have a windex file and want to search using man -k :

anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
/usr/share/man/windex: No such file or directory

To get round this, we simply go ahead and create the index with catman:

anton@opensolaris:/$ pfexec time catman -w

real        2.9
user        1.8
sys         0.1

Its pretty quick, and you get left with a little index in /usr/share/man/windex. Its just an ascii version of all the names of your manpages, plus a one line summary of what each one does:

1       1 (3openssl)   - OpenSSL configuration functions
1       1 (3openssl)   - OpenSSL configuration functions
1394       ieee1394 (7d)   - Solaris IEEE-1394 Architecture
2       2 (3openssl)   - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2       2 (3openssl)   - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2       2 (3openssl)   - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2.1       EasyTAG (1)   - Tag editor for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files
2_F32_Sat   mlib_SignalConvertShift_U8_S8_Sat (3mlib)   – data type convert
with shifting
5.0       MySQL (1)   - MySQL RDBMS version 5.0 for Solaris
6to4       tun (7m)   - tunneling STREAMS module
6to4relay   6to4relay (1m)   - administer configuration for 6to4 relay router
communication
6to4tun    tun (7m)   - tunneling STREAMS module
7-Zip       7-Zip (1)   - A file archiver with highest compression ratio

So now when you do your man -k , you’ll get something useful!:

anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
bootadm    bootadm (1m)   - manage bootability of GRUB-enabled operating system
grub       grub (5)   - GRand Unified Bootloader software on Solaris
installgrub   installgrub (1m)    – install GRUB in a disk partition or a floppy

Crucially you only want to do catman -w , otherwise you’ll be reformatting all your manpages!

From the man page of catman:

-w Only create the windex database that is
used by whatis(1) and the man(1) -f and
-k options. No manual reformatting is
done.

cd needs execute permissions to work?!

admin — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:41:51 +0000

You need execute permission on a directory to cd to it! Is read not enough? In practice, no. The chdir system call requires execute permission to make that directory the starting point for path searches. According to the chdir (system call, section 2) man page:
For a directory to become the current directory, a process must have execute (search) access to the directory.

So when trussing the output of a failed cd to a directory with no execute permissions we see:

chdir("lala") Err#13 EACCES [file_dac_search] chdir("lala") Err#13 EACCES [file_dac_search]

and as the man page goes on to say:
EACCES Search permission is denied for any com- ponent of the path name.

Reading this article explains, that of course you can’t execute a directory but rather, that the execute permission bit is reused for different purposes. Without execute permission on the directory, you can’t stat() any files within the directory. Opening, deleting and other operations on a file first require you to stat() it first, as stat() gives you the files inode. Without the files inode, theres very little you can do with it!

Armed with this knowledge you might feel inspired to check out the source code of this call for yourself!

Parolski.com » man page

Indexing your man pages

cd needs execute permissions to work?!