Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,
hope this is the correct forum for this question.

I have created a man page, named nfwatchdog.1.gz. This man page was installed under /usr/share/man/man1. When I execute: man nfwatchdog from any location, the man page is incorrectly opened (I see ASCII garbage). But when I directly execute: man /usr/share/man/man1/nfwatchdog.1.gz , the file is opened without any error.

Another weird thing is that having the same man page installed in another linux box, in the same location, is opened without any problem (typing man nfwatchdog from any location).

In both cases, the environment is the same:
Linux Red Hat, 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5.
man, version 1.6d
GNU bash, version 3.2.25(1)

Thanks in advance for any idea you could have.
nardix

Man pages are in troff format, try copying an existing man page file to /tmp and gunzipping it and you will see.

OK, that part it's clear. But how do you explain this:
I type: man nfwatchdog<enter>
and I see garbage.
I type: man /usr/share/man/man1/nfwatchdog.1.gz<enter>
and the manual is correctly displayed.

Basically, both methods are opening the same file, with the only difference that in the second case, you explicitly tells man, which file to open.

Thanks.

When i had some issue like this, the following helped.

Code:

export LANG=C

And the man page got displayed correctly.

I was able to find what is generating the problem.
In the directory /usr/share/man/man1 there are two files (the man page and a backup)
nfwatchdog.1.gz.prev
nfwatchdog.1.gz

I don't know why, but when I removed the .prev file (or renamed it as .sav), the error is gone, and the man page is now displaying ok.
Thanks.