0

Having installed TeX Live on my system (by downloading and running the script from TUG's website: http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html), I tried editing the MANPATH variable by adding the following line in my /etc/environment:

MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf/doc/man

(There was no MANPATH entry previously)

However, setting the MANPATH here seems to be overriding the /etc/manpath.config file, and thus the system manual pages are no longer found. Whereas, if I use export in my .bashrc, mandb prepends the content of manpath.config to the exported value.

What is wrong with this syntax? After all, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables does say that /etc/environment is the place for setting system-wide environment variables

The same issue for INFOPATH

Chatterjee
  • 103
  • 3

1 Answers1

0

A previous question's answers suggest that variable interpolations like $MANPATH are not supported in /etc/environment: difference between bash.bashrc and /etc/environment file . I think you would need to extend /etc/manpath.config itself with your customizations instead of using /etc/environment.

However, you probably don't need a custom installation of texlive in /usr/local in the first place. If you install it using Software Center (or sudo apt-get) instead, then the man pages would go into the default system path and the question of how to update MANPATH would be moot.

Community
  • 1
Paul
  • 7,194