*BSD News Article 53101


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From: Charlie ROOT <root@gscorp.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Manual pages sometimes miss information....
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 03:10:39 +0000
Organization: North Bay Network, Inc. news server - not responsible for content
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H i!

Every now and then when I play around or work with a new Unix flavour I'm
always tricked and fooled by the location of such non-important-never-used
tools like ping or shutdown. This becomes even more important, if they
don't reside on the normal search path and su'ing also doesnt include the
'usual' supervisor admin/tool directories. When I then type "man
<offending hopefully not missing program/thing" I usually get a lengthy
documentation about all sorts of facts of life, but [under FreeBSD] mostly
not the location of the file. NeXTSTEP for example has in allmost all
manual pages the full path to the executable, so that

	man ping

reveals

	NAME: ping - blah blah
	SYNOPSIS: /usr/etc/ping [-blah blah] 
	DESCRIPTION: blah blah

much like FreeBSDs man page, but it only states ping [-blah] in the 
Synopsis - and so for many other files.

Is there a way to ask those nice maintainers of the manual pages to add 
these kind of path/location information to the manual pages or is it 
maybe easier to write a program, which runs every now and then through 
the manual pages and "find / -name <thingy> -print" and captures the 
information and merges it into the relevant <thingy>manual page?

With kind Regards
Philipp Ott
philipp@gscorp.com,philipp@beagle.co.at