%general-entities; ]> Man We'll make three adjustments to the sources of Man. The first is a patch which allows Man to work better with recent releases of Groff. In particular, man pages will now display using the full terminal width instead of being limited to 80 characters: patch -Np1 -i ../man-&man-version;-80cols-1.patch The second is a sed substitution to add the -R switch to the PAGER variable so that escape sequences are properly handled by Less: sed -i 's/-is/&R/' configure The third is also a sed substitution to comment out the MANPATH /usr/man line in the man.conf file to prevent redundant results when using programs such as whatis: sed -i 's%MANPATH./usr/man%#&%' src/man.conf.in Now prepare Man for compilation: ./configure -confdir=/etc The meaning of the configure options: -confdir=/etc This tells the man program to look for the man.conf configuration file in the /etc directory. Compile the package: make Lastly, install it: make install If you wish to disable SGR (Select Graphic Rendition) escape sequences, you should edit the man.conf file and add the -c switch to NROFF. If your character set uses 8-bit characters, search for the line beginning with "NROFF" in /etc/man.conf, and verify that it coincides with the following: NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin1 -mandoc Note that you should use "latin1" even if it is not the character set of your locale. The reason is that, according to the specification, groff has no means of typesetting characters outside ISO-8859-1 without some strange escape codes, and localized manual pages are therefore really a hack. When formatting manual pages, groff thinks that they are in the ISO-8859-1 encoding and this -Tlatin1 switch tells groff to use the same encoding for output. Since groff does no recoding of input characters, the formatted result is really in the same encoding as input (although groff doesn't know that it is not ISO-8859-1) and therefore it is usable as the input for a pager. Of course, this hack does not solve the problem of non-working man2dvi program for localized manual pages in non-ISO-8859-1 locales. Also, it does not work at all with multibyte character sets. The first problem does not have a solution currently. The second one is not of a concern because the LFS installation does not support multibyte character sets properly anyway. You may want to look at internationalization related hints, though. You may want to also take a look at the BLFS page at which deals with formatting and compression issues for man pages. Installed programs apropos, makewhatis, man, man2dvi, man2html and whatis apropos apropos searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain a given string. makewhatis makewhatis builds the whatis database. It reads all the manual pages in the manpath and for each page writes the name and a short description in the whatis database. man man formats and displays the requested on-line manual page. man2dvi man2dvi converts a manual page into dvi format. man2html man2html converts a manual page into html. whatis whatis searches the whatis database and displays the short descriptions of system commands that contain the given keyword as a separate word.