Linux

Hey people do u know how to disable the man command in linux???

i am not able to do anythg apart from disabling the permission for /usr/bin/...
i dont wanna uninstall the man / man pages also...

this has been one of the toughest challenges i have come across in linux...

can anybody put their brains on work for this???

May I ask why do you want to do that ? Why chmod-ing /usr/bin/man is not sufficient ? What version and which is your OS ?

preventing people from running it would be how you "disable" it, yes. You could uninstall it completely if your distro lets you. I wouldn't be surprised if many distros consider man part of their fundamental base installation and can't dice it out, though... Really, manpages are fundamental and pretty harmless, so unless you're installing in a very space-critical environment, why not leave it?

im jus tryin it out...
all i knw is...IT IS POSSIBLE...n im jus findin out how!!!
i have seen it done...
i knw it is completely harmless to ur OS...but its a challenge...NOTHG STANDS IMPOSSIBLE...n that too in Linux platform...no ways...
i can easily uninstall it...but thats not sumthg i wish to achieve...i want it up and running but not functional...i admit it is a bible for beginners like me...so cant afford to loose it either!!!

im running Redhat Ent Edition 5...

btw thanks for replyin...

Of course it's possible -- you already did it -- unless I misunderstood you and you didn't?

chmod 000 /usr/bin/man to disable all permissions on /usr/bin/man .
UNIX file permissions are kind of the opposite of windows ones... on windows you might set a file 'read only', on UNIX a file must be set 'allow read' for people to read it in the first place. 0 means no permissions, 1 means execute, 2 means write, 4 means read, and you can sum those together to get combinations.

These are repeated three times, one for users, once for user groups, and once for world permissions, hence chmod 000 instead of just chmod 0.

To learn more about chmod, and UNIX file permissions in general, run 'man chmod'. Oh wait. First run 'chmod 2551 /usr/bin/man' to set man back to normal, then run 'man chmod'. The 2 in front is a special extra bit to allow others to run it as a different user.

---------- Post updated at 12:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:34 AM ----------

Rereading the thread you still seem to be hunting for some magical "other" way to disable a program. There's lots of ways to do it -- overwrite it with a shell script that yells at the user, play tricks with mount to display an entirely different partition on /usr/bin/, set the noexec flag in your fstab so no programs in there can be run at all, alias 'man' to 'fortune' in your .bashrc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Other admins could probably think of more creative and even sillier ways than mine. But none of these are the "disable_programs_without_chmod.exe" you think we're hiding from you. They're ordinary features for completely different things being (ab)used creatively. File ownership and permissions are the real way to get what you want done.

Hey Corona88,
that was very good...
just the things i wanted!!!
this is creative...
thanks a lot