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Using: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS Editor: Nano

I am working on a small shell script for college and it needs to have menu with a range of options available to the user. One of the options is to "add a directory to the manual path based on user input". I thought I had the correct answer based on materials given to me but it isn't working?

the current location of manpath is "/usr/bin/manpath"

This is my code so far:

two() {
read -p"Please enter a directory to be added to the MANPATH: " dir
manpath=/usr/share/man$dir:$manpath; export manpath
#TO SHOW IT HAS WORKED 
which manpath
}

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • the manpath is where man finds pages, not where the command itself is supposed to be. does that help at all? Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 17:05
  • Hi, thank you for your comment :) unfortunately not, i've tried replacing manpath with man and nothing works. Thank you though. Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 17:15

1 Answer 1

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manpath is a command that (executed without any flags) simply displays the paths where man looks for its pages. In other words, you cannot add a path to the command manpath.

Below is an illustration on how you can add a path - in this case the directory /foobar - to the already existing paths (on Debian 10).

# Original paths
manpath
/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man

# Adding a path
export MANPATH=$(manpath):/foobar

# Result
manpath
manpath: warning: $MANPATH set, ignoring /etc/manpath.config
/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/foobar

Does this make things a bit clearer?

Please run: man manpath. Where you will find:

DESCRIPTION
       If $MANPATH is set, manpath will simply display its contents and issue a warning.
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  • Hi, thank you very much for your response. It has made things a lot clearer to me and has allowed me to complete the my task. Thank you again :-) Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 17:47
  • I am glad to hear that @Steven, Happy Hacking! :) Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 17:48

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