MacOS – Specifying $MANPATH after installing coreutils doesn’t affect the man page displayed

bashcommand linehomebrewmacosterminal

I installed the GNU core utilities via brew install coreutils. I also added PATH=$(brew --prefix coreutils)/libexec/gnubin:$PATH to the beginning of ~/.bash_profile (and it's auto-sourced in ~/.bashrc) as to enable accessing these utilities with their default names, ant not prepended with g.

I also want access to the man pages of these utilities, so I added MANPATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman:${MANPATH-/usr/share/man}" to ~/.bash_profile as the second line. Unfortunately, when I type man ls for example, I still get the BSD man page, instead of the Gnu one. How do I fix this?

Best Answer

OK, so after researching about $MANPATH with regards to Linux\UNIX, I came across the idea of adding export MANPATH right after defining it in ~/.bash_profile. This solves the problem as required, i.e. giving me access to man pages for coreutils, and only then to their BSD versions, if no GNU version exists.

Related Solutions

Find the full man page for afplay

No afplay comes with a short (incomplete) man page.

You could open a bug report request but I doubt it will taken into consideration or you could use the content of the afplay -h to re-write the man page.

MacOS – Homebrew: Easy way to add ‘gnubin’ to path for multiple packages

The proposed find based solution takes about 5 seconds to execute on my system. The following bash snippet executes in a fraction of a second.

if type brew &>/dev/null; then
  HOMEBREW_PREFIX=$(brew --prefix)
  # gnubin; gnuman
  for d in ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/opt/*/libexec/gnubin; do export PATH=$d:$PATH; done
  # I actually like that man grep gives the BSD grep man page
  #for d in ${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/opt/*/libexec/gnuman; do export MANPATH=$d:$MANPATH; done
fi

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Find the full man page for afplay

MacOS – Homebrew: Easy way to add ‘gnubin’ to path for multiple packages

Related Question