I got annoyed today when I ls-ed on my Mac OS X 10.5 system and saw this:
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 root wheel 170 Jun 7 17:35 F9D86DAF-2868-4918-948A-110BB55DAB11
Well, that’s not what got me annoyed. I tried to look up what the ‘@’ after the permissions meant in the man page and it didn’t mention it at all. I searched the web and found someone quote an excerpt of the man page that explained the ‘@’. And it was not in my man page at all! That is when I got annoyed.
Then I remembered an exchange with a commenter: earlier where it seemed like my docs were old.
So I set out to find why my man pages were out of date. After some poking around I discovered this:
$ ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1* -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 15708 Mar 1 2006 /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6220 Apr 20 2008 /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz
So at some point the system installed new, nicely gzipped man pages but somehow failed to remove the old ones. And it turns out the man give the non-gzipped version precedence. Giving me old out of date documentation when I ask for it. Weak.
A quickie perl script seemed in order:
find /usr/share/man -name "*.gz" -or -print \
| perl -ne 'chomp; print "$_n" if -f "$_.gz" && -M $_ > -M "$_.gz"' \
| xargsn -n 10 sudo rm
where xargsn is defined in my .bashrc file as:
alias xargsn="tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0"
Using GNU xargs you can just do xargs -d\\n which is way easier for me to remember but stupid bsd xargs doesn’t appear to have the nice -d option. Weak, but I digress.
Anyway, the script finds non-gzipped files in the system man hierarchy and, if they have an equivalent gzipped version that happens to be newer, deletes them.
I had about 4500 that I was able to delete, and now my ls and chmod man pages have up-to-date info again. Aaaahhhhh.
You might notice that I only deleted the non-gzipped version if it was older. It turns out I had about 10 man pages where the opposite was true. So I tweaked my script a little and did this:
find /usr/share/man -name "*.gz" -or -print \
| perl -ne 'chomp; print "$_n" if -f "$_.gz" && -M $_ < -M "$_.gz"' \
| xargsn -n 1 sudo gzip -f
This one gzips the man page and replaces the older gzipped version when they both exist and the gzipped is older.