CL6.0 Manpages and less

[Michael Hertel]

Is it just me or does the search feature of this forum seem to be worse?

Anyway…

I’ve just installed 6.0 on AIX.

I miss the fact that less is no longer available.

Anyway…

I’m using tcsh and am looking for syntax on grep.

This is what I get:

hci ppcf% man grep

sh[9]: less:  not found

hci ppcf%

Any ideas?

Topic

[Russ Ross]

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.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Russ Ross]

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.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Russ Ross]

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:

Code:

export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/opt/freeware/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/dt/man:/localperl/man:/opt/freeware/man:/usr/local/ssl/man:/usr/lpp/X11/man

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

Code:

/cloverleaf/cis6.0/integrator/man
/cloverleaf/cis6.0/integrator/tcl/man
/cloverleaf/cis6.0/integrator/dbms/man
/opt/freeware/man
/usr/local/man
/usr/share/man
/usr/dt/man
/localperl/man
/opt/freeware/man
/usr/local/ssl/man
/usr/lpp/X11/man

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Robert Milfajt]

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,

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Michael Hertel]

Thanks guys…

I had one of our Unix admins hunt down less for me. He claimed it was for an older version of AIX too but he compiled it on a test box and it worked so he put it on our CL6.0 host. It’s working fine and the man pages are working too. Not sure where the man/less connection comes in.

Anyway, thanks Russ for pointing out lsof also.

I renamed the /cis6.0/integrator/bin version to xlsof which causes us to run /usr/local/bin/lsof which works fine.

[Robert Milfajt]

Michael Hertel wrote:

Not sure where the man/less connection comes in.

man/less, now that’s funny.

Man Up!   8)

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Russ Ross]

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.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Michael Hertel]

Russ, When I said: “Not sure where the man/less connection comes in.”

I was referring to the shell error:

hci ppcf% man grep

sh[9]: less:  not found

I was not sure why sh was looking for less when I called man.

Editor’s note: More fodder for Robert   🙂

[Russ Ross]

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.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Michael Hertel]

Ok, so I did some exploring and found there is an environment variable called PAGER.

Part of the login scripts set it: (I grepped PAGER in my .*)

.login:setenv PAGER less

Apparently I’m guessing this is where it came from.

[Russ Ross]

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.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Author]

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