[Bug 1001189] Re: 'man' command fails with lseek error

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

I'm not particularly familiar with the inner workings of man-db, but as
far as I can see both versions of man-db  use "libgdbm3 >= 1.8.3", so I
wouldn't expect there to be a .db-file format change between Lucid and
Precise, off hand.  But it does seem like "extra" man files are in play,
somehow...

You might check for differences in the environment variable lists
between the different environments, in particular the LANG and LC_*
variables.

Based on what  the "man" man page says: you could try "man -u" and see
if that complains about any of the index files.  Also, I guess "man"
looks for a config file in  $HOME/.manpath; do such files exist in your
NIS accounts?

If not,  the /etc/manpath.config file's MANDB_MAP lines appear to list
the directories where man looks for the index files (in the CATPATH
column).

Or, it might be easier to run man under "strace" and just see directly
what file it's trying to open or process when it dies...

Nathan

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1001189

Title:
  'man' command fails with lseek error

Status in “man-db” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  When trying to look up the on-line documentation using the 'man'
  command it fails on 12.04 with lseek error. For example:

  $ man resolvconf
  gdbm fatal: lseek error

  This lseek error applies to other requests as well (e.g. ls, fdisk,
  etc). System information is:

  $ lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  Release:	12.04

  apt-cache policy man
  man:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: (none)
    Version table:

  However, it is installed since it runs as a command, and I find:

  $ which man
  /usr/bin/man

  $ man --version
  man 2.6.1

  What I expect is to read the manual page appropriate to the
  command/program, and not get a software error.

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