Re: man-db cron.daily job

[Carlos Sousa <csousa@tvtel.pt>]

Colin Watson wrote:

> (can't have been any vaguely recent version of man-db, as none of them
> run with root privileges ...). man-db can certainly work around it,

my 'man' apparently runs with root privileges:

$ ll /usr/lib/man-db
total 220
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Sep 26 00:55 ./
drwxr-xr-x  131 root     root        36864 Sep 26 14:33 ../
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        90684 Sep 19 02:20 man*     <==
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        70844 Sep 19 02:20 mandb*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4328 Sep 19 02:20 wrapper*

though a ps aux shows the man process as belonging to the current user:

carlos  15166  0.0  0.6  1696 772 pts/0   S   02:23  0:00 man 1 chown

> 'chown -R man /var/cache/man' will fix your problem for now.

Thanks, that solved my initial problem (the man-db cron job not being 
able to delete stale files).

However, *.gz files are still not created for ordinary users, only for 
root. Doesn't keep me awake at night, but it's a symptom for something 
not right. If man is running as the ordinary user that called it, it 
seems logical that it can't create files in a directory with write 
permission only for user 'man'?...

I can always uninstall and reinstall the man-db package, that'll clear 
the time-space warp that's clearly the cause of this thing :)

Thanks for the help, Colin.

Carlos