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Order of sections to search


From: Alejandro Colomar
Subject: Order of sections to search
Date: Tue, 30 May 2023 01:32:25 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.11.0

Hi Colin,

I've recently installed some packages that bring a lot of man pages
with them, and for some reason they are preferred by man(1).  See:

$ whatis open
open (2)             - open and possibly create a file
open (2freebsd)      - open or create a file for reading, writing or executing
open (3perl)         - perl pragma to set default PerlIO layers for input and...
open (3posix)        - open file
$ man -w open
/usr/share/man/man3/open.3perl

man(1) seems to prefer open(3perl) over open(2), which is a bad default.
In other cases, freebsd pages also usually hide the page I'm looking for.

The defaults in my Debian Sid are (according to man(1)):

              1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 5 4 9 6 7

I suggest that any subsections not specified in the default list go at
the end, in a second pass to that list that would take into account
subsections, so for example:

        1 > 3 > 1foo > 3foo

Does this make sense to you?

Cheers,
Alex

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