Re: broken man pages

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Andrew D Dixon <andrew.dixon@seranoa.com> wrote:
>I've got a problem with my man pages.  For some reason the permissions
>are wrong and it can't create a temporary file.
>
>stiq:~# man man
>man: can't create a temporary filename: Permission denied
>stiq:~#

That suggests that /tmp, or whatever your $TMPDIR is set to, isn't
writeable by the 'man' user. /tmp and /var/tmp should both normally be
mode 1777. If you've got a private $TMPDIR, then you may be running into
bug #92459 (http://bugs.debian.org/92459).

In the last couple of versions in unstable, man is no longer setuid by
default, and in that case this problem will go away.

Here's one (admittedly not ideal) temporary solution, if you're not
running unstable which is the only branch I can really fix:

  alias man='TMPDIR=/tmp man'

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