"man" command returning duplicated results in mac terminal

Question

When I

man -k "^printf"

in terminal, it returns duplicated results below:

printf(1)                - formatted output
printf(1)                - formatted output
printf(3), fprintf(3), sprintf(3), snprintf(3), asprintf(3), dprintf(3), vprintf(3), vfprintf(3), vsprintf(3), vsnprintf(3), vasprintf(3), vdprintf(3) - formatted output conversion

And, When I

man -k 1

It also returns a bunch of duplicated results.

It's a new M1 MAX Mac, I didn't even do any setting changes yet, but the problem above is actually happening. What's wrong with my new Mac?

Answer 1

You could do man -w and see where the man looks for manpages. This issue (duplication of results while using man -k printf ) arises, if your system has copies of manpages in multiple path.

In my system there are multiple man paths. See below the output of my man -w .

/usr/local/opt/w3m/share/man/de:/usr/local/opt/w3m/share/man:/usr/local/opt/binutils/share/man:/Users/xx/opt/anaconda3/share/man:/usr/local/share/man/de:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/Library/TeX/texbin/man:/opt/X11/share/man:/Library/Apple/usr/share/man:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/share/man:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/share/man:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/share/man

Out of this, below two has some of the manpages replicated. For example printf can be found in both path.

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/share/man/

/usr/share/man/

If you do ls -l in the MANPATH , you will see that both has copies of some of the same manpages.

 > ls /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/share/man/
man1 man2 man3 man4 man5 man6 man7 man8 man9 mann


> ls /usr/share/man/
man1 man4 man5 man6 man7 man8 man9 mann

In short, when you do man -k somecommand , it displays results from all the paths contained in man -w . If you want to avoid that you need to change the $MANPATH environment variable. Set it to the path you want your man command to look.