[Man-db-devel] Listing all man pages on the MANPATH

[calle]

Hello,

I'm working on a fuzzy search tool that accepts choices on stdin and prints
the selected one on stdout. I want to use this tool to search for man pages
on my MANPATH to then display them using man(1).

To accomplish this, I have to find a way of listing all man pages on the
MANPATH and I think the fastest way of doing so would be to use the mandb.

I have been able to accomplish almost exactly what I want using
`apropos -l .`. The only remaining problem is that apropos(1) will truncate
the names of man pages if they are really long (even though the -l flag is
used).

Is there a way of getting around this? It does not look like that from the
source.

I have tried to get man-db to build on my system in order to change the
behavior of apropos(1) to my liking but I'm running in to errors. After
running:

./autogen.sh
./configure

`make` will fail with the following error:

Making all in gnulib/po
make[2]: Entering directory '/home/calleerlandsson/Projects/man-db/gnulib/po'
make[2]: *** No rule to make target 'all'.  Stop.
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/calleerlandsson/Projects/man-db/gnulib/po'
Makefile:1509: recipe for target 'all-recursive' failed
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/calleerlandsson/Projects/man-db'
Makefile:1436: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2

Unfortunately, I'm to inexperienced to know why the 'all' rule is missing.
Do you know?

I would be very thankful for any hint or pointer in the right direction.

Thanks in advance,
Calle Erlandsson

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