Re: [HACKERS] Re: [ANNOUNCE] New man pages

Thomas Lockhart wrote: >> Oh, I get it.  Can everyone handle multi-character man sections? > >That is how, for example,
theX system does their man pages. There are >sections "1x", etc. Except that now that I look on my RH linux system
>theyare squirreled away in /usr/X11/man/man1/, etc so I must have >seen that on another system. Perhaps my old Alpha
boxes??
 
Pages from multi-character sections are stored in the directory for the
first character.  For instance: /usr/man/man7/select.7l.gz
 >> I would like to use existing sections, rather than do our own.  I found >> I had to modify the man page search to
lookin a manl, and others may >> have the same problem. 
 
For Debian, I have relocated the SQL pages to section 7l and commands such
as psql and createuser go in section 1.  Policy requires me to use one of
the numbered sections (1-8), though I can use a suffix to ensure uniqueness.

On Debian GNU/Linux, the sections are:
1 User commands
2 System calls
3 Library routines
4 Devices
5 File formats
6 Games
7 Miscellaneous
8 System administration

... >otoh, it does eliminate the possibility of man page pollution if we >manage to have the same man page name as some
otherexisting page.
 

As of course we do; for example, select is also in section 2.
 >*That* would be a bad thing. And in general adding ~75 man pages to >existing sections is a pretty big load...

I'm not sure that's much of a problem. These are the figures from my
system for /usr/man, /usr/share/man, /usr/X11R6/man and /usr/local/man
combined:

Section   Count
1          2258
2           236
3          6554
4            39
5           236
6            26
7           128
8           517

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