My main machine is running macOS 14 Sonoma, but I often ssh into Ubuntu servers. Recently I noticed a strange difference between the man program on these platforms.
On Ubuntu, man displays a useful "prompt" in the bottom-left corner: 
It can be configured with the --prompt option - man --prompt "hey unix stackexchange!" man results in:
But on macOS, prompt is not there:
At first I thought that I may be simply using different versions of man. On Ubuntu man --version prints man 2.11.2, but on macOS this option doesn't exist:
$ man --version /usr/bin/man: illegal option -- - Usage: man [-adho] [-t | -w] [-M manpath] [-P pager] [-S mansect] [-m arch[:machine]] [-p [eprtv]] [mansect] page [...] man -f page [...] -- Emulates whatis(1) man -k page [...] -- Emulates apropos(1 Then I decided to see what the man executables really are, and the result surprised me.
On Ubuntu:
$ file $(which man) /usr/bin/man: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=93e22c77b20c329ec51dad530c40fd0d64fc696f, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped on macOS:
$ file $(which man) /usr/bin/man: POSIX shell script text executable, ASCII text My questions are:
- why does
manon Ubuntu (and probably on Debian and many other) differ so much from macOS'sman? - how can I have a more fully-featured
manon macOS?
man-db, many of their man pages are truly vintage - not updated in 20 years (e.g.man ls). The only salvation from this malfeasance is (e.g.) MacPorts. I love my Macs (have several), but I really do not care for their cavalier attitude toward the system manuals.