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Status Future consideration
Workspace z/OS
Categories Shell & Utilities
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 25, 2021

RELATED IDEAS

Allow Site and Vendor whatis files

With the growth in the use of the z/OS Unix (OMVS) environment there are more non-IBM additions to the set of available commands. The majority of these additional commands come from outside IBM.

Many of these commands (one would hope all) have man pages associated with them, and the path to these are typically added to the MANPATH environment variable.

This does not mean that users can find them easily unless they know the exact command name. That means that the user will use the 'man -k xxx' command to search the /usr/man/?/whatis file for a command with 'xxx' in the command or description.

Since only the IBM z/OS UNIX provided commands are in the whatis file, and there is no available means to add these other commands to it, the user has no easy way to find the newly added commands.

There are various options to resolve this but one that seems easy is for the 'man -k' process to check in the MANPATH for any whatis file with the naming convention of whatis.???? where ???? is replaced by the vendor, product, site, or someone, providing a unique whatis.???? file for each directory within the MANPATH that includes the man pages within.

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 26, 2021

    Yes, man will only search the 1st whatis file. Put this as an candidate for release work. thans

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 24, 2021

    The suggestion to create a whatis in a new directory and then add that to the manpath as the 1st entry just causes the 'man -k ' to look in that whatis file instead of the ibm provided whatis file, not in addition to the ibm provided whatis.

    At least that's what my test just now demonstrated.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 13, 2021

    There should be a whatis file in the manpage directory but not whatis.dovetail.
    For example, adding a whatis file in a temp directory and the content is below:

    u/suptcn >> cat tmp/whatis
    hello - hello is an example for whatis addition by vendor

    Add the directory in the the MANPATH
    export MANPATH=/u/suptcn/tmp:$MANPATH

    when you want to look for hello with man -k, it will work.

    /u/suptcn >> man -k hello
    hello - hello is an example for whatis addition by vendor
    /u/suptcn >> man -k ll
    hello - hello is an example for whatis addition by vendor

    Can this address the problem?

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