CL6.0 Manpages and less

It is not uncommon for some of your favorite goodies (ex: less) to disappear on a cloverleaf upgrade especially if doing a scratch install of the OS and cloverleaf.

Some of thes goodies are freeware/shareware.

We noticed that less had gone bye bye on our AIX 6.1 cloverleaf 6.0 scratch install/upgrade.

Personally I did not use less but my co-worker Jim Kosloskey likes to use it so I asked our sys admins to work on getting it installed and they did.

Sometimes these goodies don’t come on the AIX 6.1 install CD and they grab them from other sources like Linux.

I believe the other gooides that came up missing that I had them work on installing is lsof and noticed pstree not there today and have asked them for that, too.

As far as man pages go, I’m seeing more and more scratch installs that don’t install man pages unless explicitly specified and that might be what you ran into.

Our sys admins know to explicity specify man pages for the systems they build for me or else I’m going to call them and they end up doing it anyway.

Personally I disagree with no man pages being installed as the norm but that is how it is here.

Another thing about man pages, if you think man pages are installed be sure to set the MANPATH environment variable to include where the man pages are located.

I do this during the login process using the $HOME/.profile.local.end file.

Here is my current entry:

so when I echo $MANPATH while logged in as hci I see these directories:

Sometimes less is more!    😀

I use less a lot and when I end up on other AIX boxes that don’t have it find it frustrating.   😡

You might be able to get less back!  I see that it is located in $HCISITEDIR/bin for the older version.  You should be able to copy that file to someplace where you have custom code, and that is set in your UNIX PATH variable.  In my case, /usr/local/bin.

I haven’t tried this, but will before upgrading to CL 6.0.  Would be interested to hear if less works in newer versions of AIX, but as it’s a compiled executable, I’m thinking there is a good chance it does.

Hope this helps,

Not sure where the man/less connection comes in.

man/less, now that’s funny.

Man Up!   8)

There is no man/less connection.

I suspect I was responding to something about where did my man pages go and posted my answer here, which obviously is not the right place.

The other case is I’m just going daffy.

At least it added to the awareness that less is not the only utility that we might turn up missing.

Now wouldn’t that be interesting if man depends on calling less to display man pages when less might not be installed on the box.

Sort of looks like some OS utilities might also have come to depend on less in some cases.

If that is true it certainly would attest to the populaity of less even more.

That certainly sounds like a good possibility that PAGER might be the environment variable you can set to force things like man to use less instead of whatever the default is.