| Has IDLDE screwed up my man pages? [message #36624] |
Sun, 12 October 2003 05:13  |
profxtjb
Messages: 22
Registered: October 2003
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Junior Member |
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Newcomer to IDL, running idlde on Macintosh G4 OS 10.2.4. Also not a
Unix freak.
Recently I was messing with preferences in idlde and I think I may
have messed up the path settings in my system. IDL works fine, but
when I slip out to the xterm screen or over to Terminal, my man pages
don't work! Here is the error message, e.g., after entering 'man ls'
/usr/bin/groff: troff: Illegal instruction
/usr/bin/tbl:/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1:368:fatal error: output error
Here is the system variable $path,
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Users/me:/usr/X11R6/bin
Here is manpath output
/usr/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man
I have the paths preference set to <IDL_DEFAULT>.
Or is this a problem because I tried using online help from the idlde
command window?
RSVP and thanks.
==thomas==
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| Re: Has IDLDE screwed up my man pages? [message #36767 is a reply to message #36624] |
Thu, 16 October 2003 16:54  |
condor
Messages: 35
Registered: January 2002
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Member |
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profxtjb@earthlink.net (Thomas Brueckner) wrote in message news:<52e94d00.0310120413.52fd70a2@posting.google.com>...
> Newcomer to IDL, running idlde on Macintosh G4 OS 10.2.4. Also not a
> Unix freak.
>
> Recently I was messing with preferences in idlde and I think I may
> have messed up the path settings in my system. IDL works fine, but
> when I slip out to the xterm screen or over to Terminal, my man pages
> don't work! Here is the error message, e.g., after entering 'man ls'
>
> /usr/bin/groff: troff: Illegal instruction
> /usr/bin/tbl:/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1:368:fatal error: output error
I know nothing about macs of BSD, but in unixy terms this looks as if
groff is passed troff as a command. I would start looking in
/etc/man.config where TROFF should be defined. On my own system that
looks like this:
TROFF /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc
I could also imagine that "messing with preferences" may have involved
setting locale preferences or a switch from ascii to utf-8 or latin1
or some such incompatible thing that is certainly bound to confuse
groff.
Another thing to try might be running "man" on a command you've never
man'ed before: maybe the formatted files in the "cat" directories got
messed up somehow and reformatting from scratch works just fine.
I would suggest "man man", but of course your "man" doesn't work %)
But you could 'locate' it and nroff it by hand:
[16:50] Bird [nest] > locate man.1
/usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz
[16:50] Bird [nest] > cd /usr/share/man/man1
[16:50] Bird [nest] > gunzip man.1.gz -c | nroff -man | more
Another thing that I don't know about OSX/BSD is whether it has the
'info' facility. If yes, then it seems that 'info ls' (or even just
'info') is much better than 'man ls' anyways...
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