?? on LFS Man Pages

[rcguyett]

Hello,

First of all this is a awsome site!!!

Ok, I'm a student and I'm creating a new distro using LFS for my graduation project. I have started downloading the nessasary files for building the system as per the LFS book. What I would like to know is how can I rename the Man Pages to another name? Is this even possible.
I'm designing a distro that I hope will appeal to women and help educate them more on the Linux enviroment.

Thanks for the help.
Christine

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

While it would be possible, it really isn't feasible, at least in my own opinion.

Can you tell us why you would want to do this?

[rcguyett]

Hi Oz,

I suppose I don't have to, but the purpose is more of the humor I suppose, since I am creating a distro for women, I just wondered if the Man pages can be renamed like Woman pages. Thanks

[Cabhan]

So you just want to have a command called "woman" that works just like "man"? That's really very simple: you just rename the "man" binary (or create a link to it). The two following commands do that:

mv /usr/bin/man /usr/bin/woman
ln -s /usr/bin/man /usr/bin/woman

In your case, you could obviously simply build it in that way.

If you want to make this change more permanent (so that compiling the files creates a "woman" binary instead of a "man" binary), you would need to modify man's Makefile accordingly. To do that, you'll probably want to read up on automake and Makefiles, and you can find man's makefile in its source code.

"man" is just the name of a compiled program: that name can be changed very easily without affecting the operation of the program.

[MikeTbob]

Cabhan, Hiya!
Wouldn't it be easier, to just create an alias?

alias woman="man"
Making the change permanent with the .bashrc file or for system wide settings, /etc/bashrc?

[Cabhan]

I think that an alias and a link would operate on essentially the same level of ease here. The advantage of a link, in my opinion, is that the command "which woman" would work for a link, but not for an alias.

But yeah, an alias or a link would both enable a superficial correction. You would still have issues with the man pages being actually stored in /usr/share/man/, but that would be very hard to correct (well, I guess you could do it with links, but...).

[MikeTbob]

I think that an alias and a link would operate on essentially the same level of ease here. The advantage of a link, in my opinion, is that the command "which woman" would work for a link, but not for an alias.

But yeah, an alias or a link would both enable a superficial correction. You would still have issues with the man pages being actually stored in /usr/share/man/, but that would be very hard to correct (well, I guess you could do it with links, but...).

Good thinking about the "which woman" command, I guess the same would be true for other commands like "whereis woman". I like your idea better!