46 Documentation? Nothing showed up, so I started looking in /usr/man. This is despite the fact that I know that things can be elsewhere, and that my MAN- PATH already contained /usr/man (and every other directory in which I had found useful man pages on any system). I expected to see something like: michael: cd /usr/man michael: ls man1 man2 man3 man4 man5 man6 man7 man8 manl What I got was: michael: cd /usr/man michael: ls local p_man u_man (%*&@#+! SysV-ism) Now, other than the SysV vs. BSD ls-format- ting difference, I thought this was rather weird. But, I kept on, look- ing for anything that looked like cat3 or man3: michael: cd local michael: ls kermit.1c michael: cd ../p_man michael: ls man3 michael: cd ../u_man man1 man4 michael: cd ../p_man/man3 michael: ls Xm Now, there’s something wrong with finding only an X subdirectory in man3. What next? The brute-force method: michael: cd / michael: find / -name lockf.3 -print michael:

On-line Documentation 47 Waitaminit. There’s no lockf.3 man page on system? Time to try going around the problem: send mail to a regular user of the machine. He replies that he doesn't know where the man page is, but he gets it when he types “man lockf.” The elements of his MANPATH are less than helpful, as his MANPATH is a subset of mine. So I try something other than the brute-force method: michael: strings `which man` | grep "/" | more /usr/catman:/usr/man michael: Aha! /usr/catman! A directory not in my MANPATH! Now to drop by and see if lockf is in there. michael: cd /usr/catman michael: ls a_man g_man local p_man u_man whatis System V default format sucks. What the hell is going on? michael: ls -d */cat3 g_man/cat3 p_man/cat3 michael: cd g_man/cat3 michael: ls standard michael: cd standard michael: ls Bingo! The files scroll off the screen, due to rampant SysV-ism of / bin/ls. Better to just ls a few files instead: michael: ls lock* No match. michael: cd ../../../p_man/cat3 michael: ls I luck out, and see a directory named “standard” at the top of my xterm, which the files have again scrolled off the screen…