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Date:      Thu, 12 Oct 1995 08:09:21 +0100 (MET)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        tjackson@tulsix.utulsa.edu (Tom Jackson)
Cc:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Try this
Message-ID:  <199510120709.IAA11967@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <9510120329.AA27617@tulsix.utulsa.edu> from "Tom Jackson" at Oct 11, 95 10:29:56 pm

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As Tom Jackson wrote:
> 
> Another small thing not related to ports, the GNU man program does not 
> find personal man pages in your home directory as the docs say it does.
> My fix is to turn the suid off for man. This seems to work perfect now.

I've been trying, and there seems to be more than a single problem
here.  I've noticed that manpath(1) claims i had a "./man" element in
my MANPATH (i dunno where this should have come from).  man(1)
stumples across this since it does the following (wrong) thing: "cd
./man; cat ./man/man1/foo.1 | ...".  I think the "cd ..."  could
entirely go away, i cannot see a very good reason to keep it.

The behaviour you're describing does happen if your home directory (or
an element of the path to your "personal man page") is not at least
searchable by your own group ID, e.g. your home dir has 0700
permissions.  man(1) should be made smarter about this situation by
temporarily giving up its suidness if it's detecting such a
constellation.

The suidness of man(1) is intentionally.  It allows for directories
named /usr/share/man/cat[1-8], which have to be writeable for user man
only instead of world-writeable.  (Due to some not yet known error in
our release building process, the final releases do not come with
those directories pre-installed as they ought to be.)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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