bug#10840: 24.0.93; No `man' command completion on Windows (using Cygwin for man pages)

[Wolfgang Jenkner]

On Sat, Dec 15 2012, Wolfgang Jenkner wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 17 2012, Drew Adams wrote:
>
>>> >  $ man -k ^
>>> >  ^: nothing appropriate
>>> 
>>> I guess your `man' doesn't support this option, or maybe it needs for
>>> you to create the apropos database.  In any case, "M-x man" should
>>> handle this kind of output gracefully, which it evidently doesn't.
>>
>> ping
>
> As Eli suggested, the question is if your man program supports the `-k'
> option.
>
> If you don't have a `whatis' database you should have a `makewhatis' or
> a `mandb' program to generate it.

I suspect you have the man program from

http://primates.ximian.com/~flucifredi/man/

In this case, essentially, "man -k ^" ends up calling "apropos ^", which
gives this output if it can't find any `whatis' database file or all
those files are empty.

Otherwise, "man -k ^" works fine, even in the 1999 vintage man-1.5g.

Also, `apropos' is a shell script, so you can easily inspect it and
debug your `man' installation.

> Hitting TAB (with no minibuffer input) completes the empty input to the
> two chars `^:'.  Thereafter I can do nothing with that.  Whether I type
> anything after the `^:' or not, TAB just completes to `^:'.

The empty string is a prefix of "^:",

> If I instead first type `l' (as in `ls') and then hit TAB, I get [No
> match].  It doesn't seem to matter what I type in the minibuffer: TAB
> always says [No match].

but "l" is not a prefix of "^l:".