manpage naming conflicts

[fvgit]

Not sure if this topic is more of a general OpenBSD question, but since it involves stuff from ports I'm putting it here.

I've installed tcl-8.6. Regarding manual pages the pkg-readme instructs you thusly:

Manual Page Configuration
=========================
Adding the following lines to /etc/man.conf wil enable man(1)
and related commands can find the Tcl and Tk manual pages.

manpath /usr/local/lib/tcl/tcl8.6/man
manpath /usr/local/lib/tcl/tk8.6/man

Works as expected. The problem is that the man pages don't have unique names.
If I type

man file

I get the man page with the Tcl file command instead of file(1)
Any pro tips how to resolve such conficts?

[IdOp]

Not a pro here, but the -a flag to man(1) will display all matching pages.

% man -a file

So you just keep quitting your pager until it's showing the one you want. That's a somewhat coarse-grained solution. It may be possible to do something more clever with other man(1) flags.

[J65nko]

No idea if those Tcl man pages are a specific section. If that is the case you could specify the section number.

As an example there are 2 different man pages named re. See re(3) and re(4).
To read these from the command line:

$ man 3 re
$ man 4 re

[fvgit]

I realised I made a configuration error. If you use man.conf(5) you also have to supply paths to the default manpages. So my current man.conf now looks like this:

manpath /usr/share/man
manpath /usr/X11R6/man
manpath /usr/local/man
manpath /usr/local/lib/tcl/tcl8.6/man
manpath /usr/local/lib/tcl/tk8.6/man/

Previously I only had the last two lines in it, assuming these would somehow be added to the manpage paths. With the updated man.conf in place your solutions work nicely:

Originally Posted by IdOp

Not a pro here, but the -a flag to man(1) will display all matching pages.

% man -a file

So you just keep quitting your pager until it's showing the one you want. That's a somewhat coarse-grained solution. It may be possible to do something more clever with other man(1) flags.

Actually, you don't have to quit the pager. At least that's what's happening here. With the above config file and your command I get all matching manual pages displayed one after the other visually separated by a line. I just have to scroll down hitting <space>.

Originally Posted by J65nko

No idea if those Tcl man pages are a specific section. If that is the case you could specify the section number.

As an example there are 2 different man pages named re. See re(3) and re(4).
To read these from the command line:

$ man 3 re
$ man 4 re

Indeed. Most of the Tcl man pages are in section n.
So

man n file

works like a charm.

Problem solved. Thanks guys!