MacOS – “man say” in macOS fails

macosmanmojave

macOS 10.14.4

If I type man say at the command line, I get the error: man: no manual page say.

I've checked and the file say.1 is present in the folder /usr/share/man/man1. Why can man not find it?

Best Answer

I'm on High Sierra and when I do a man -aw say it shows the following:

$ man -aw say
/usr/share/man/man1/say.1

Which agrees with your location as well. You can use the following command to see how man is attempting to display the appropriate man page for say:

$ man -d say |& grep say
  (cd '/usr/share/man' && /usr/bin/tbl '/usr/share/man/man1/say.1' | /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | (/usr/bin/less -is || true))

Based on that output my say.1 man page is located here: /usr/share/man/man1/say.1.

You can copy/paste this command in pieces to see where things are breaking for you as well.

For example:

$ cd '/usr/share/man'
$ /usr/bin/tbl '/usr/share/man/man1/say.1' | less
$ ...
$ ...

And keep adding pieces to see where it's failing on your end.

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