Re: Man-DB is crazy

["Kevin B. McCarty" <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU>]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> Kevin B. McCarty wrote:

>>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
> 
> It would be a lot easier to use the -L option and do it in one command.
> 
>   ls -lL /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz
>   -rw-r--r--  1 root root 1369 2005-03-10 14:55 /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz

Thanks, that's a useful option to ls!  I learn something every day :-)

> In spite of your evidence to the contrary I believe that the link in
> question must really be dangling.  I just can't believe otherwise
> because of the series of symlinks.  I feel certain there was a mistake
> in there somewhere.

Unfortunately I get the exact same thing you did:

benjo[3]:~% ls -lL /usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1369 2005-03-10 16:55
/usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz

(I take it you're using gnome-terminal too.)  So I'm still not convinced
of man-db's sanity.  Although I didn't get such an error message in my
email this morning, so maybe the situation has resolved itself somehow
(maybe I installed another package that caused man-db to rebuild its
database???)

I hate when computers act non-deterministic.

regards,

-- 
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu>   Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/    Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751                 Princeton, NJ 08544