Cfrtjryk

I am using WSL on win10 with lxrunoffline distribution managing utility. My distro is Ubuntu 18.04 core install that can be found here - download link.

Typing man man, man pwd or man <anything> produces the following result:

No manual entry for man

See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.

Here's some commands I tried:

$ sudo mandb

Purging old database entries in /usr/share/man...

Processing manual pages under /usr/share/man...

Purging old database entries in /usr/share/man/cs...

Processing manual pages under /usr/share/man/cs...

Purging old database entries in /usr/share/man/da...

Processing manual pages under /usr/share/man/da...

...

0 man subdirectories contained newer manual pages.

0 manual pages were added.

0 stray cats were added.

0 old database entries were purged.





$ sudo mandb -t   */ output here certainly looks suspicious /*

mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/sh.1.gz is a dangling symlink

mandb: warning: can't update index cache /var/cache/man/index.db: Resource temporarily unavailable

mandb: warning: can't update index cache /var/cache/man/cs/index.db: Resource temporarily unavailable

mandb: warning: can't update index cache /var/cache/man/da/index.db: Resource temporarily unavailable

mandb: warning: can't update index cache /var/cache/man/de/index.db: Resource temporarily unavailable

...





$ dpkg -l | grep -i manpages

ii  manpages                    4.15-1                            all          Manual pages about using a GNU/Linux system

ii  manpages-dev                4.15-1                            all          Manual pages about using GNU/Linux for development

ii  manpages-posix              2013a-2                           all          Manual pages about using POSIX system

Also I checked /usr/share/man folders and they were mostly empty (other manpath folders were completely empty), except some broken symbolic link:

$ manpath

/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man

$ cd /usr/share/man/man1

$ ls -alh

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0K Nov 27 18:16 .

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0K Sep 28 04:02 ..

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    9 Sep 28 04:00 sh.1.gz -> dash.1.gz

$ file sh.1.gz

sh.1.gz: broken symbolic link to dash.1.gz

Then I tried putting man gzips I found on Ubuntu manpages website into man1 folder and that makes it to work properly:

$ cd /usr/share/man/man1

$ ls -alh

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0K Nov 27 18:16 .

drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0K Sep 28 04:02 ..

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.1K Nov 27 18:16 ls.1.gz <-- downloaded this one

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    9 Sep 28 04:00 sh.1.gz -> dash.1.gz

*/ 'man ls' works now /*

Also tried reinstalling mandb and manpages to no avail.

Downloading man page files manually solves the issue but there's gotta be some package or config that does that for me. How can I solve this?

Edit 1

$ head -n 1000 /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/*

==> /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg <==

# dpkg configuration file

#

# This file can contain default options for dpkg.  All command-line

# options are allowed.  Values can be specified by putting them after

# the option, separated by whitespace and/or an `=' sign.

#



# Do not enable debsig-verify by default; since the distribution is not using

# embedded signatures, debsig-verify would reject all packages.

no-debsig



# Log status changes and actions to a file.

log /var/log/dpkg.log



==> /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes <==

# Drop all man pages

path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*



# Drop all documentation ...

path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*



# ... except copyright files ...

path-include=/usr/share/doc/*/copyright



# ... and Debian changelogs

path-include=/usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.*

The first two lines of /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes

# Drop all man pages

path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*

cause all man pages to be dropped when packages are installed.

To make man pages available, you’ll have to comment the second line out:

# Drop all man pages

# path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*

then re-install any package for which you want the man pages:

apt --reinstall install man-db coreutils

to restore the man and ls man pages (among others).