man pages broken after dist-upgrade

Question

After a recent dist-upgrade, I have broken man pages. Symptoms are that man <any command here> refuses to load anything and shows a blank console, except for the line in the upper left:

Manual page man(1) line ?/? (END) (press h for help or q to quit)

After quitting, I get the following error line:

man: command exited with status 4: /usr/lib/man-db/zsoelim | /usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//IGNORE | preconv -e UTF-8 | tbl | nroff -mandoc -rLL=195n -rLT=195n -Tutf8

This isn't helpful for me. I tried sudo mandb and sudo mandb -c with no success.

No. I also tried purging, but it didn't help. Neither man nor man-db reinstall helped to get rid of the problem. — emk2203, Feb 23 '18 at 18:47
Possibly something relevant here? https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=889608 — steeldriver, Feb 23 '18 at 19:27
@steeldriver: This looks good. The first fix didn't help in my case, but I think that is exactly the issue here. There seems to be an issue with man 2.8.0 and higher - running man 2.8.1 here. — emk2203, Feb 23 '18 at 20:04

score 15 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 22 '18 at 06:56

15

The following commands worked for me:

apt install apparmor-utils
aa-disable /usr/bin/man

Upstream Bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=889617

edited Oct 22 '18 at 06:56

N0rbert

99,918

answered Oct 22 '18 at 05:57

nithal

166

1

This apparently happens because the kernel is old. Here's a thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=6453 – fuzzyTew May 10 '20 at 19:43

man pages broken after dist-upgrade

1 Answers1