I have installed man and man-pages but no manual entry even for ls

[Sundeep]

I am making a custom TCL for an introductory course on Linux and scripting.

How do I make man command work in Tiny Core Linux?

[bmarkus]

Install man.tcz and less.tcz

Than delete /usr/bin/less and create a symlink

ln - /usr/local/bin/less /usr/bin/less

Now man works in text mode. In terminal may not work properly with ESC sequences. If it happens install lxterm.

Of course you need files installed.

[Sundeep]

I installed both man and man-pages

less is also installed and according to PATH settings, /usr/local/bin/less takes precedence over /usr/bin/less

Still the man command returns no manual entry for any command (except man man)

[bmarkus]

Just for testing install mc-doc.tcz and try man mc

If it doesn't work, what is written by the program in the terminal?

Regarding man-pages, there are no man page for ls command. Please check it's content.

[Sundeep]

Okay, I just checked /usr/local/share/man
There are lots of man pages there but not just the ones I was trying like ls, perl, find, grep etc
Any way to add those man pages?

[curaga]

You might want to use network man pages in that case (make man a script invoking lynx to manpages.ubuntu.com or other such site).

But note that the man pages will describe GNU tools, which may differ from busybox tools.

[Sundeep]

Well, network is out of question - when students would be using there won't be internet connection...
The one I created with tiny core linux was just under 40 MB, but things like man, color options for ls/grep etc are beginning to look wrong idea for students starting with linux..

I think I will have to look for other small distros to suit my purpose (basic linux commands with man pages, vim, perl, tcl, bash scripting) - let me know if there are ones for this (max 300 MB)

Thanks for all the help

[curaga]

I doubt you'll reach that size goal: a basic set of compressed man pages is already 50mb, perl is 40mb, tcl is 10mb, vim is 15mb, etc. You'll blow half the budget on the needed applications and docs, and the base system of a modern mainstream distro tends to be more than 150mb.

A stripped-down Debian could do that in ~600mb I think.

edit: One solution you could try is to grab just the man pages from a Debian/Ubuntu/etc install and use with TC, if the applications work for you. You can install GNU ls, grep and so on.

[Sundeep]

I didn't know that man pages were so huge!
I could do without man pages for perl, vim, tcl
But man pages for basic linux commands like ls/rm/cp/mkdir/rmdir/grep/find/sort/uniq/cmp/etc are definitely required..

[curaga]

The perl/etc sizes I listed were for the packages sans documentation

[Sundeep]

The perl/etc sizes I listed were for the packages sans documentation

I am confused now! My whole TCL remastered iso built on 15 MB core by adding perl, vim, tclsh8.5, bash came to less than 40 MB.

edit: One solution you could try is to grab just the man pages from a Debian/Ubuntu/etc install and use with TC, if the applications work for you. You can install GNU ls, grep and so on.

Yeah, I can try that

[curaga]

They were also uncompressed sizes, as most distros cannot run compressed like TC does. Only the man pages number was for gzipped man pages.