man does not work (too many arguments)

Question

I get this an error when trying to run man on a Linux system:

$ LC_ALL=C man man

man: Too many arguments
Try 'man --help' or 'man --usage' for more information.

My man command doesn't seem to be an alias:

command -v man: /usr/bin/man

What's going on?

Is your man an alias? Check with type man or command -v man. — Kusalananda, Jan 18 '19 at 08:59
alias ll='ls -l --color=auto |grep ''' -'''' alias ls='ls --color=auto' — NeedHelp, Jan 18 '19 at 09:02
@jayooin It's setting the default locale to the standard C locale. There is nothing strange about that bit. — Kusalananda, Jan 18 '19 at 09:22
@Kusalananda, Thanks for the enlightning. @NeedHelp, Have you tried running with absolute path ? /usr/bin/man ? — jayooin, Jan 18 '19 at 09:26

score 40 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 18 '19 at 09:24

40

Check the existence of MANOPT variable.

MANOPT
If $MANOPT is set, it will be parsed prior to man's command line and is expected to be in a similar format.

Example:

$ MANOPT='foo bar'
$ export MANOPT
$ man man
man: Too many arguments
Try 'man --help' or 'man --usage' for more information.
$

An obvious ad-hoc fix is to unset MANOPT. Then you should investigate where the variable came from.

answered Jan 18 '19 at 09:24

Kamil Maciorowski

So why is the error Too many arguments? Like if I export MANOPT=foo, why doesn't it say No manual entry for foo? – wjandrea Jan 19 '19 at 01:06
1

@wjandrea man is probably splitting MANOPT on spaces and then running the resulting array through getopt(3), and complain if any non-option arguments (ie arguments not starting with a dash) are left. They could've used a better error message. Anyways, even a single argument is too much for it: try MANOPT=man man man. – Jan 19 '19 at 04:57

1 Answers1