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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!usenet.ufl.edu!usenet.cis.ufl.edu!caen!usenet.coe.montana.edu!bsd.coe.montana.edu!nate From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: man works sssslow Date: 2 Jun 1994 14:20:28 GMT Organization: Montana State University, Bozeman Montana Lines: 35 Message-ID: <2skprc$ho1@pdq.coe.montana.edu> References: <2sjka9$qmd@panix2.panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 153.90.192.29 In article <2sjka9$qmd@panix2.panix.com>, Boris Pitel <scibp6p@panix.com> wrote: > Hi, everybody! > I have may be simple question. I just installed FreeBSD 1.0. Everything > seems to work OK as far as you can determine in 1/2 hour. But... > When I did "man ls" the system as usually told it's "reformating ....." > and was doing the reformating for 3-4 minutes. Hmm, with a 486-66 I have a REAL hard believing it took 3-4 minutes when on my box it took 3-4 seconds. > After I did "man ls" again > the man pages appeared immediately. It seems that every new topic I am trying > to man takes considerable amount of time to "reformat" . This is because FreeBSD uses a more historical version of man that deals with unformatted man-pages. This allows you to install unformatted man-pages and then it will format them on the fly. This is 'traditional' unix behavior, and it saves a large amount of time during builds. > Before I installed NetBSD and I didn't have any problems with man. That's because the version of NetBSD you installed uses a version of man that can't deal with unformatted man-pages. I *think* newer versions of NetBSD use a man that can handle both formatted and unformatted man-pages, though it's not as flexible as the version in FreeBSD. It's a 'feature'. :-) Nate -- nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu | FreeBSD core member and all around tech. nate@cs.montana.edu | weenie. work #: (406) 994-4836 | home #: (406) 586-0579 | Looking for a good job.