This is Installman-just-blew-up-on-me in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 16-May-1990 15:48:02 From: eric@bode.ee.ualberta.ca (Eric Norum,EB 547,4626) Subject: Installman just blew up on me! I have used installman several times before with no problems, but this time it blew up and took the Unix Manpages index with it. 1. I like to keep all local documentation under `manl', so I first: cp shar.1 shar.l 1. Then to install it I (as root): installman shar.l 2. This produced the following output (I have inserted the '<backslash><newline>'s to make it easier to read): cp shar.l /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages/manl nroff -man /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages/manl/shar.l | \ uniq > /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages/catl/shar.l chmod 0444 /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages/manl/shar.l \ /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages/catl/shar.l /usr/lib/indexing/ixBuild -i /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages \ -c '/usr/lib/indexing/man-keys %s' \ -d '/usr/lib/indexing/man-desc %s' \ /NextLibrary/Documentation/Unix/ManPages/manl/shar.l failed. 3. That's it, just `failed', no error message or anything. Note that the nroff had no problem with the manual page, but ixBuild (apparently) did. The file `-rw------- 1 root 840278 May 15 22:06 index.C.009891' was left in the current (shar source) directory. The digital libarian manpages index was destroyed. 4. I rebuilt the manpages index by: rm /usr/man/cat?/* /usr/man/whatis and then the `Create Index' item in the digital librarian. This took about an hour. 5. I tried to see exactly what was happening inside `installman' so I created a little program which copied its arguments to a file in /tmp, forked and exec'd a Bourne shell (/bin/osh), and recorded the exit status of that shell. I copied /bin/sh to /bin/osh, put my program in `/bin/sh' and tried installman again. Poking round in the entrails thus recorded I noticed that `ixBuild' apparently called `exit (1);'. I assume that the non-zero exit code is what installman is taking as the failure, but id would have been nice for ixBuild to say `why' it was returning the non-zero status. Anyone have an ideas what went wrong? This was with version 1.0 of the operating system. From now on I am going to tar all of /usr/man/.index to a safe place before running installman so I can recover a little more gracefully. Eric Norum Dept. of Electrical Engineering uucp: ...!alberta!bode!eric University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada. phone: (403) 492-4626
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