Re: [bug-gawk] Manual section of core extensions manpages

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 12:28:35PM +0100, Manuel Collado wrote:
> Looking into several machines, it seems that sometimes man subsections (3x)
> are put in its own directory (man3x), and sometimes they are merged into the
> main section (man3).
> 
> The man utility is not very smart. It just looks into a directory which
> exactly match the section argument, if given.

On my Linux system, man is a little smarter than that.  For example:

bash-4.2$ strace -eopen man 3am filefuncs 2>&1 | grep filefuncs
open("/usr/share/man/man3/filefuncs.3am.gz", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/usr/share/man/man3/filefuncs.3am.gz", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/usr/share/man/man3/filefuncs.3am.gz", O_RDONLY) = 3
       filefuncs - provide some file related functionality to gawk
       @load "filefuncs"
       The  filefuncs  extension adds several functions that provide access to

It finds the filefuncs man page in the man3 directory, even when provided
with the 3am argument.

So Arnold's solution works well on my Fedora 19 system using the man-db
ipmlementation from http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/.

Regards,
Andy