# "No manual entry for <command>"



## mickey79 (Jul 24, 2007)

Ave,

My man pages seem to have vanished!! No matter what I try to man, i get nothing but:

"No manual entry for <command>"

I have MacPorts installed, so i did "sudo port install man" to install latest man pages, which it did ... but it didn't make any difference. I can't get man to pull up anything!!

Any suggestions?


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## Giaguara (Jul 25, 2007)

Hmm... would 'apropos man' give anything for you?


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## artov (Jul 26, 2007)

Check what manpath program shows. For me, it shows

/sw/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/opt/local/man

Check the directories listed. Also, you might like to run Disk Utility's "Verify Disk Permissions".


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## mickey79 (Jul 27, 2007)

@ Giaguara:
"apropos man" first prints "WARNING: terminal is not fully functional" and then a whole bunch of different commands. Lots & lots of them. 

@ artov:
manpath prints "/opt/local/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/opt/local/share/man"
Already did "Verify Disk Permissions", didn't help.

I've checked lots of directories - including the ones that manpath prints. I find directories called "man" in all these directories - with further subdirectories in them. However, "man <command>" for example "man ls" still gives the same - "No manual entry for <command>".


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## Giaguara (Jul 28, 2007)

Hm. I get for manpath /sw/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man
Any idea why yours links to /opt/ ?


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## artov (Jul 28, 2007)

The command man actually executes a pipe of commands. If I set the environment variable PAGER to some funny value, I get the pipe printed:

% PAGER=foo man ls
sh: line 1: foo: command not found
man: No such file or directory
Failed to open the message catalog man on the path NLSPATH=<none>

Error executing formatting or display command.
System command (cd /usr/share/man && /usr/bin/tbl /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 | /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | foo) exited with status 32512.
No manual entry for ls


The commands in the pipe are:

- tbl: converts tables in manual pages to Troff commands
- groff: converts Troff text to ascii text
- foo: value of the PAGER environment value

The PAGER environment variable contains name of the command that shows text files. I guess it is normally "less" or "more". Since you said that you get 


> "WARNING: terminal is not fully functional"


, it might be that your current viewer is not functional.

So you see: one command in the pipe failed, but the error message said that the man page was not found.


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## mickey79 (Jul 30, 2007)

Although that got a little confusion, It did begin to make sense after a few concentrated reads. You might be on the right direction - only Question is - how to fix it?

Is there anyway to reinstall "Terminal" app in itself? Or perhaps reinstall "man" with all it's dependencies?

Not sure. 



artov said:


> The command man actually executes a pipe of commands. If I set the environment variable PAGER to some funny value, I get the pipe printed:
> 
> % PAGER=foo man ls
> sh: line 1: foo: command not found
> ...


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## artov (Jul 31, 2007)

mickey79 said:


> Although that got a little confusion, It did begin to make sense after a few concentrated reads. You might be on the right direction - only Question is - how to fix it?
> 
> Is there anyway to reinstall "Terminal" app in itself? Or perhaps reinstall "man" with all it's dependencies?
> 
> Not sure.



I use iTerm  instead of Terminal;  mainly because it is semi transparent and has multi-tabs. It claims to be full VT100 emulator, so you might like to check it. If you still get the terminal error messages, then check the PAGER (and VISUAL) enviroment variables. After that, you should check man program (but I do not know how to reinstall it, sorry).


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## mickey79 (Jul 31, 2007)

I'm looking into iTerm as we speak!
Where can I check the PAGER & VISUAL env var's? 

Thanks!!



artov said:


> I use iTerm  instead of Terminal;  mainly because it is semi transparent and has multi-tabs. It claims to be full VT100 emulator, so you might like to check it. If you still get the terminal error messages, then check the PAGER (and VISUAL) enviroment variables. After that, you should check man program (but I do not know how to reinstall it, sorry).


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## mickey79 (Jul 31, 2007)

Ave,

After trying everything suggested here and everything I could find on Google - and with nothing helping - And the fact that I was having another simultaneous problem with Macromedia Studio MX 2004 not working - I finally gave in!

Reinstalled Operating System altogether. Chose the "Archive & Install" option from the Mac OS X Panther 10.3 Disc. After installation completed, ran all updates and got 10.3.9.

Finally! It works! Man pages are working normal. 

Thanks everyone who contributed.


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## sr105 (Apr 30, 2013)

SOLVED (for me):

I couldn't get the man pages for 7za to load from manually installing p7zip. It turns out that "man" is picky about permissions. I changed the permissions on my man file from 600 to 644 like the others in /usr/share/man/man1 and the page was found.

I'm including this phrase to help this pop-up higher in google:  "No manual entry for 7za"


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