On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 06:57:52 -0400 (EDT)
"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday(a)crashcourse.ca> wrote:
how does one establish an alias for an existing man page if
it's not
done in the "obvious" way? as an example, currently on my system,
under /usr/share/man/man5, i have these two entries:
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4807 Feb 1 15:19 utmp.5.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 36 Feb 1 15:19 utmpx.5.gz
predictably, both of the following generate the same man page:
$ man 5 utmp
$ man 5 utmpx
because the smaller of the two files is simply a reference to the
other:
$ gunzip -c utmpx.5.gz
.so man5/utmp.5
$
however, i recently installed the package
"containers-common", which installed (among other things) the single
man page file under /usr/share/man/man5:
/usr/share/man/man5/containers-storage.conf.5.gz
with that installed, both of the following commands work fine and
generate the same output:
$ man 5 containers-storage.conf
$ man 5 storage.conf
but i see no "shortcut" file in that directory to support the second
form, so i'm assuming there is some other mechanism by which this can
be done, i just don't know what it is. thoughts?
I'm not sure, but the expansion of the file containers-storage.conf.5.gz
has it defined as
.TH "storage.conf" "5" " Container Storage Configuration
File" "Dan Walsh" "May 2017"
I am guessing that man uses both the definitions and the actual
directory listing in combination to determine the presence of a man
file.