For reasons I can't determine, within the last two days the "man" command stopped working on my linux server (Ubuntu 18.04). When attempting to run man <anything> I end up at a blank instance of vi (presumably because it's using vimpager somewhere in the background)... once I quit out of the vim instance I see the following errors on the console:
lwobker@lwobker-vms:~$ man ls cat: /tmp/vimpager_4620/cols: Permission denied cat: /tmp/vimpager_4620/lines: Permission denied head: cannot open '/tmp/vimpager_4620/stdin' for reading: Permission denied sed: can't read /tmp/vimpager_4620/stdin: Permission denied mv: cannot move '/tmp/vimpager_4620/stdin.work' to '/tmp/vimpager_4620/stdin': Permission denied cat: /tmp/vimpager_4620/stdin: Permission denied /usr/bin/pager: 242: /usr/bin/pager: cannot open /tmp/vimpager_4620/stdin: Permission denied /usr/bin/pager: 239: [: Illegal number: This happens regardless of whether I'm running at a "regular" user, or if I do sudo man <anything> or if I do sudo bash and run it that way.
Clearly there's a permissions issue somewhere but I'll be damned if I can figure out where. All the /tmp directories mentioned in the error messages are present and have read permissions set, so I can't quite figure out why all these commands are complaining.
lwobker@lwobker-vms:/tmp$ ll vimpager_4234/ total 60 drwx------ 2 lwobker lwobker 4096 Nov 8 10:47 ./ drwxrwxrwt 24 root root 40960 Nov 8 10:56 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 lwobker lwobker 11 Nov 8 10:47 1.vim -rw-r--r-- 1 lwobker lwobker 9664 Nov 8 10:47 stdin -rw-r--r-- 1 lwobker lwobker 0 Nov 8 10:47 stdin.work 
touch /tmp/vimpager_1234/testfile?