Re: Help wanted: Cannot use 'man' cmd

[Colin Watson <cjw44@flatline.org.uk>]

On Sun, Apr 01, 2001 at 04:54:14AM +0200, Guenter Millahn wrote:
> I have an off-topic question:
> 
> Since I did a system upgrade on my Debian/x86 box,

What version of man-db do you have now? ('dpkg -l man-db')

> I cannot use the 'man' command no longer. I get the message:
> 
> myhost# man ls
> man: can't create a temporary filename: Permission denied
> myhost# 
> 
> Any idea what I can do?

Is $TMPDIR set to somewhere that the user 'man' might not be able to
write to? Not that tempnam() should be using $TMPDIR if it can't write
to it, but you never know. (And yes, I realize man shouldn't be using
tempnam() ...)

For what it's worth, I've never been able to reproduce these problems as
root, although I'm aware of the reasons behind it. I'm inclined to get
rid of the wrapper that makes it difficult to use man as root.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]