MAN.CONF(5)

NAME
man.conf - man(1) and manpath(1) configuration files

DESCRIPTION
The man.conf file is used to configure the manual search path, locales, and utility set for man(1) and its related utilities. During initialization, man(1) reads the configuration files located at /usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf and /etc/man.conf.

The files contained in /usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf are intended to be used by packaging systems for extending the manual set to support additional paths and locales. /etc/man.conf is intended to be used by the local administrator to set additional policy.

Currently supported configuration variables include:

MANCONFIG
    Overrides the default location to import additional manual configuration files. Defaults to /usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf.

MANPATH
    Adds the specified directory to the manual search path.

MANLOCALE
    Indicates support is available for the given locale.

For pages in a given language, overriding the default toolset for display is supported via the following definitions:

EQN_LANG
NROFF_LANG
PIC_LANG
TBL_LANG
TROFF_LANG
REFER_LANG
VGRIND_LANG

See the EXAMPLES section for how to use these variables.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
The parser used for this utility is very basic and only supports comment characters (#) at the beginning of a line, blank lines, multiple spaces or tabs as argument separators.

FILES
/etc/man.conf
    System configuration file.
/usr/local/etc/man.d/*.conf
    Local configuration files.

EXAMPLES
A perl port that needs to install additional manual pages outside of the default location could install a file in /usr/local/etc/man.d/perl.conf with the following contents:

    # Add perl man pages to search path
    MANPATH /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.9/man
    MANPATH /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.9/perl/man

A Japanese localization port could install a custom toolset and include a file in /usr/local/etc/man.d/ja-man-doc.conf with the following contents:

    # Setup Japanese toolset
    MANLOCALE	ja_JP.eucJP
    EQN_JA		/usr/local/bin/geqn
    PIC_JA		/usr/local/bin/gpic
    TBL_JA		/usr/local/bin/gtbl
    NROFF_JA	/usr/local/bin/groff -man -dlang=ja_JP.eucJP
    TROFF_JA	/usr/local/bin/groff -man -dlang=ja_JP.euc.jp

If the system administrator decides to override the LOCALBASE make(1) variable causing all ports(7) to be installed into /opt instead of /usr/local, specifying the following in /etc/man.conf will accommodate this change:

    # Look for additional configuration files
    MANCONFIG /opt/etc/man.d/*.conf

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), manpath(1), whatis(1)