problems with "man" command under cygwin

Sat May 17 18:10:00 GMT 2003

Dmitry,
The "unsafe" diagnostic means that one of man's internal attempts to 
execute an external program refused to do so because the name of the 
command contained one or more of these "unsafe" characters:
 Semicolon
 Space
 Single quote
 Double quote
 Backslash
This test is imposed by the simplified built-in sprintf function 
(my_xsprintf(char *format, ...) in .../src/util.c) when the %S 
formatting directive is used. If the %S argument fails the safe 
characters test, my_xsprintf returns "unsafe". This is the ultimate 
source of your diagnostic. Since there are many (26, in fact) places 
where %S is used to create a command string, there are many 
opportunities for this to happen. %S is used both for command names and 
for file names. (Man does not attempt to apply quoting to the commands 
it constructs internally, so it has to be pretty restrictive in 
constructing those command strings.)
Have you installed Cygwin or set up any of the environment variables 
used by man (any that contain file or directory names) such that they 
contain a forbidden character?
Perhaps this is enough for you to locate the source of your problem.
Oh... Since you cannot run man, here's the section on its use of 
environment variables:
-==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==-
MANPATH
 If MANPATH is set, man uses it as the path to search for manual
 page files. It overrides the configuration file and the auto-
 matic search path, but is overridden by the -M invocation
 option. See SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES.
MANPL
 If MANPL is set, its value is used as the display page length.
 Otherwise, the entire man page will occupy one (long) page.
MANROFFSEQ
 If MANROFFSEQ is set, its value is used to determine the set of
 preprocessors run before running nroff or troff. By default,
 pages are passed through the tbl preprocessor before nroff.
MANSECT
 If MANSECT is set, its value is used to determine which manual
 sections to search.
MANWIDTH
 If MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the width manpages
 should be displayed. Otherwise the pages may be displayed over
 the whole width of your screen.
MANPAGER
 If MANPAGER is set, its value is used as the name of the program
 to use to display the man page. If not, then PAGER is used. If
 that has no value either, /usr/bin/less -isrR is used.
LANG
 If LANG is set, its value defines the name of the subdirectory
 where man first looks for man pages. Thus, the command `LANG=dk
 man 1 foo' will cause man to look for the foo man page in
 .../dk/man1/foo.1, and if it cannot find such a file, then in
 .../man1/foo.1, where ... is a directory on the search path.
NLSPATH, LC_MESSAGES, LANG
 The environment variables NLSPATH and LC_MESSAGES (or LANG when
 the latter does not exist) play a role in locating the message
 catalog. (But the English messages are compiled in, and for
 English no catalog is required.) Note that programs like col(1)
 called by man also use e.g. LC_CTYPE.
PATH
 PATH helps determine the search path for manual page files. See
 SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES.
SYSTEM
 SYSTEM is used to get the default alternate system name (for use
 with the -m option).
-==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==-
Good luck.
Randall Schulz
At 20:38 2003年05月16日, dmitry levandovsky wrote:
>Hi,
>>I have installed the latest cygwin packages a couple of days ago, but 
>have the following strange result when I try to use the "man" command:
>>$man man
>unsafe: not found
>Error executing formatting or display command.
>System command unsafe exited with status 32512.
>No manual entry for man
>>I get the same result no matter what man page I request. I am running 
>Windows XP and I have istalled sh, groff, and less using the latest 
>cygwin setup program.
>>Now, man used to work on my PC just fine, until I tried installing the 
>ghostscript package, then it started to have this problem with man. I 
>tried uninstalling ghostscript, then the "man" package, and even all of 
>cygwin, and then installing it back. Still I get the same problem. Does 
>that mean something got messed up in my registry? I could edit the 
>registry if I knew what to look for.
>>Could someone help please?

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