%general-entities; ]> Man A few adjustments need to be made to the sources of Man. First, a sed substitution is needed to add the -R switch to the PAGER variable so that escape sequences are properly handled by Less: cp configure{,.orig} sed 's@-is@&R@g' configure.orig > configure Another sed substitution comments out the MANPATH /usr/man line in the man.conf file to prevent redundant results when using programs such as whatis: cp src/man.conf.in{,.orig} sed 's@MANPATH./usr/man@#&@g' src/man.conf.in.orig > src/man.conf.in Finally, correct a syntax error in the makewhatis script: cp src/makewhatis.sh{,.orig} sed 's@)) |@) |@' src/makewhatis.sh.orig > src/makewhatis.sh Prepare Man for compilation: ./configure -confdir=/etc -confdir=/etc This tells the man program to look for the man.conf configuration file in the /etc directory. Build makemsg using the hosts gcc. It is executed during the build gcc src/makemsg.c -o src/makemsg Compile the package: make Install the package: make DESTDIR=${LFS} install If you will be working on a terminal that does not support text attributes such as color and bold, you can disable Select Graphic Rendition (SGR) escape sequences by editing the man.conf file and adding the -c option to the NROFF variable. If you use multiple terminal types for one computer it may be better to selectively add the GROFF_NO_SGR environment variable for the terminals that do not support SGR. If the character set of the locale uses 8-bit characters, search for the line beginning with NROFF in /etc/man.conf, and verify that it matches the following: NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin1 -mandoc Note that latin1 should be used even if it is not the character set of the locale. The reason is that, according to the specification, groff has no means of typesetting characters outside International Organization for Standards (ISO) 8859-1 without some strange escape codes. When formatting man pages, groff thinks that they are in the ISO 8859-1 encoding and this -Tlatin1 switch tells groff to use the same encoding for output. Since groff does no recoding of input characters, the f ormatted result is really in the same encoding as input, and therefore it is usable as the input for a pager. This does not solve the problem of a non-working man2dvi program for localized man pages in non-ISO 8859-1 locales. Also, it does not work with multibyte character sets. The first problem does not currently have a solution. The second issue is not of concern because the LFS installation does not support multibyte character sets. Additional information with regards to the compression of man and info pages can be found in the BLFS book at . Installed programs apropos, makewhatis, man, man2dvi, man2html, and whatis Short Descriptions apropos Searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain a given string apropos makewhatis Builds the whatis database; it reads all the man pages in the MANPATH and writes the name and a short description in the whatis database for each page makewhatis man Formats and displays the requested on-line man page man man2dvi Converts a man page into dvi format man2dvi man2html Converts a man page into HTML man2html whatis Searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain the given keyword as a separate word whatis