user man doesnt work

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: user man doesnt work
started by: IDK

Posted by IDK on May 11 2006,15:41

When I run man not as root it displays the last page viewed by root.
When I exit it says /tmp/man/: Permission denied.

It wasn't like this when I installed it...
Why does that happen and how can I fix it?

Posted by mikshaw on May 11 2006,18:49

Sounds like a bug that everybody overlooked =o)

Running the man script in DSL creates the file /tmp/man, but it apparently is not removed afterward (or maybe man was closed before /tmp/man was removed...i don't know what perl is doing most of the time). So if you run it as root, the /tmp/man file will be owned as root, and cannot be modified later by a regular user.

To fix this, use the command sudo rm /tmp/man to delete the temp file as root, then you should be able to use man as a regular user.

John: What if the "/tmp/man" file was instead "/tmp/man-$USER"? I know some people might be uncomfortable having a file called "man-root" on their systems, but it's just an idea.

Posted by IDK on May 11 2006,20:13

Thanks