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Niklas Rosencrantz
Asked: 2017-08-13 10:38:59 +0800 CST

All manpages broken

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I can't use manpages. The manpages don't display anything. Looks like an empty vi file every time.

I tried reinstalling man-db and reinstalling perl. It didn't work. It seems that my man database is broken.

enter image description here

I even can't try and open a manpage directly, it also becomes the blank screen:

$ man -l man/hello.1 
man: command exited with status 3: /usr/lib/man-db/zsoelim | preconv -e UTF-8 | tbl | nroff -mandoc -Tutf8

On OpenBSD it works.

16.04

1 Answers

  1. Run:

    sudo mandb -c; echo $?

    To force mandb to delete previous databases and re-create them from scratch.

    At the end you should get "0", if not check for:

    1      Usage, syntax, or configuration file error.  
2      Operational error.  
3      A child process failed.

    You can also run: sudo mandb -t to perform:

    correctness checks on manual pages in the hierarchy search path.

    It helps you to find out what is wrong.

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