catman

[marc seguin]

On a HP-UX 11.11 :
# catman -w
Deroff: Input buffer overflow

But the file /usr/share/lib/whatis is created...
Is this file complete ?
Is the error important ?

[Stefan Farrelly]

If your whatis db is created and its size around 145k then I think everything is fine. Theres probably a patch to fix the error, or you can try coping over the catman binary from an 11.0 box and run it on 11.i, works fine.

[Dirk Kochale]

Hi marc

please use catman -n -p and you can see what catman do

HTH Dirk

[marc seguin]

Sorry, Dirk, but 'catman -n' is exactly the opposite as what I want (catman -w).
I used the binary files "catman' and 'deroff' from a HP-UX 11.11
(mkwhatis scripts are very similar between 11.0 and 11.11) but i still have the same message.
My file whatis is more than 600kb big.
And when i look at what is inside, it is really a mess.
So i don't worry about this little error message.
HP should rebuild its man pages, or have its commands (mkwhatis, deroff) evoluate.

example :
accumulate(3C++) becomes :
accumulate ++)

marc.

[Frank Slootweg · Accepted solution]

I am a little confused because you say "And when i look at what is inside [whatis], it is really a mess.", but you also say "So i don't worry about this little error message.". Now does "man -k ..." work or not?

Anyway, this seems to be a known problem (SR 5003448456). The quick fix is to change "cut -c1-1024|deroff | ..." in /usr/lbin/mkwhatis to "cut -c1-1023|deroff | ...". In 11.0 the "-1024" was put in to fix a similar problem, but apparently it should have been "-1023", apparently a line-feed problem.

[marc seguin]

With the change (1024 -> 1023) there is no more error message and I have 2 dozens of commands more in the whatis file.

Yes, "man -k" works since the beginning.
And the mess I'm talking about comes from the man pages which are not correctly written, in most cases, and the mkwhatis script which can't handle them. So there are some strange lines in the whatis file.