Re: Man-DB is crazy
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 09:44:15 -0400
"Kevin B. McCarty" <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Once a day I get the following email message from the man-db cron job:
>
> > /etc/cron.daily/man-db:
> > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz is a dangling symlink
>
> This in spite of all the evidence:
>
> > benjo[1]:~% ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz
> > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 2005-09-09 10:05 /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz -> /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz
You might need to follow the links. This happens occasionally over
here, and I wondered about it as well. Try looking in /etc/
alternatives, you may find that the file x-terminal-emulator.1.gz
points nowhere, or is nonexistant. Or, it points back to a manpage in /
usr/share/man/man1 that does not exist.
Here, I have a message that refers to the manpage for ftpd(8) being a
dangling symlink (/usr/share/man/man8/ftpd.8.gz)
$ root@3[man8]# ls -l ftpd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Oct 3 2004 ftpd.8.gz -> /etc/alternatives/
ftpd.8.gz
oot@3[alternatives]# ls -l ftpd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Oct 3 2004 ftpd -> /usr/sbin/wu-ftpd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Oct 3 2004 ftpd.8.gz -> /usr/share/man/
man8/wu-ftpd.8.gz
OK, so far so good - let's see what is in /etc/alternatives now:
$ oot@3[alternatives]# ls -l ftpd*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Oct 3 2004 ftpd -> /usr/sbin/wu-ftpd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Oct 3 2004 ftpd.8.gz -> /usr/share/man/
man8/wu-ftpd.8.gz
Now, we need to check where ftpd.8.gz points to:
root@3[man8]# ls -l wu*
ls: wu*: No such file or directory
root@3[man8]#
Bingo. There's the dangling symlink. In my case, I'm not going to be
veryworried about this as I don't really have a need for an ftp server
(and there are better ones than wu-ftpd AFAIK). But I did find one
relating to vi - jsut had to correct the /etc/alternatives/vi.1.gz to
point to the right flavor of vi on my system (vim).
> Please CC replies to me as I'm not subscribed.
OK, done.
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