broken pipe on makewhatis.cron

[Art Werschulz]

Hi.

Running FC4 on a bunch of Intel i686 boxes ...

We recently replaced an older i686 with a newer model. We installed FC4 on
same. /etc/cron.weekly/makewhatis.cron produces the msg
zcat: stdout: Broken pipe
65 times in its email report.

For what it's worth, it appears that /var/cache/man/whatis is OK and
up-to-date.

Does anybody have an explanation for this error msg, and how to fix same?

Thanks.

[HASM]

Post by Art Werschulz
We recently replaced an older i686 with a newer model. We installed FC4 on
same. /etc/cron.weekly/makewhatis.cron produces the msg
zcat: stdout: Broken pipe
65 times in its email report.

I get this once in a while, but not every week. Never bothered to figure
out what caused or whether anything is broken. I'd assume that the
following week makewhatis will fix it and only if it failed every single
week I would try debugging it.

-- HASM

[Moe Trin]

On 05 Feb 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.questions, in article

Post by Art Werschulz
/etc/cron.weekly/makewhatis.cron produces the msg
zcat: stdout: Broken pipe
65 times in its email report.

/usr/sbin/makewhatis here is a Bourne shell script. Zcat is used to
read the man pages that are compressed with gzip. There is an error
recovery mechanism in the script, but that message suggests than when
zcat tried to read the file, it couldn't. One reason I've seen for that
is a broken link. You might try using find to locate links in the entire
MANPATH and see if some are missing. Another way to find this would
be to use 'rpm -Va' and see what the package manager thinks is broken.
You may want to run that command as root to avoid permission problems,
and DO expect a number of "false" positives (mainly ownership changes
and configuration files).

Old guy