Re: Man-db problem

[Micah Anderson <micah@riseup.net>]

This is not a security issue, as far as I can tell. Take a look at
/etc/cron.daily/man-db and see what it does. You will see something
like this:

# regenerate man database
if [ -x /usr/bin/mandb ]; then
    # --pidfile /dev/null so it always starts; mandb isn't really a
    # but we want to start it like one.
    start-stop-daemon --start --pidfile /dev/null \
					        --startas /usr/bin/mandb --oknodo --chuid man \
							-- --no-purge --quiet
fi

Run this on the command line, as root, without the --quiet option, and
you will see errors that might need to be fixed. 

This same thing happened to me, after a couple crashes and fscks
messed up some of my man directory so some manpages.1.gz were turned
into directories, or just plain mush. I had to remove those completely
to get the man-db regeneration to work, and would have to be
reinstalled from the original packages that they came from in order to
get the man pages properly returned.

micah


On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Per Tenggren wrote:

> Hey!
> 
> I updateed my Woody a few days ago and every night I receive the following
> mail from Cron:
> 
> Subject:
> Cron <root@xxx> test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report
> /etc/cron.daily
> 
> Message:
> run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/man-db exited with return code 3
> 
> I never had this problem before update!
> 
> Regards
> Per
> 
> 
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