Chapter 8 Setting Up the Online Manpages

Fastest response to the man command (but heaviest disk space usage):

Create a formatted version of all the manpages. This is a good method if you have enough disk space to hold the nroff originals and the formatted pages for the time it takes to finish formatting. To start the formatting process, enter:

Formatting all the manpages can take some time, so you might want to run the process at a lower priority.

Medium response time to the man command (with medium disk space usage):

Format only heavily used sections of the manpages. To format selected sections, enter:

where sections is one or more logical section IDs from the HP-UX Reference, such as 1, 1m, 2, 3. Note that the letter m is lowercase. For example,

Slowest response to the man command (but lightest disk space usage):

Do not format any manpages. HP-UX will format each manpage the first time a user specifies the man command to call up a page. The formatted version is used in subsequent accesses (only if it is newer than the unformatted source file).

To improve response time, you can make directories to hold the formatted manpages. To determine the directory names you need, check the MANPATH variable. For example, to create directories for the default /usr/share/man directory, execute the following script:

You only need to create the cat8.Z directory if /usr/share/man/man8.Z exists. To save disk space, make sure you use the cat*.Z directories (not cat*) because if both cat*.Z and cat* exist, both directories are updated by man.