Enabling the man pages

The man command displays help information about both shell commands and the z/OS® UNIX set of TSO/E commands. To use man pages on z/OS UNIX, you must have a SEPHTAB data set cataloged in your system, and the SEPHTAB data set name must be available to the BookRead service called by the man command.

When configuring your system to use man pages:
  1. Catalog a SEPHTAB data set in your system and make the SEPHTAB data set name available to the BookRead service called by the man command. The SEPHTAB data set contains translation tables used to translate data from the internal BookManager® softcopy format to the code page displayed by BookManager.
  2. Make sure that the BookServer-supplied EPH.SEPTHTAB data set is available. If you are using the default IBM-supplied prefix on data set EPH.SEPHTAB, the setup for man pages is simple. All you have to do is let the shell know where to find the man pages by setting the MANPATH environment variable.
  3. Tell the shell where to find the man pages by setting the MANPATH environment variable:
     MANPATH=/usr/man/%L

After you configure the system for man pages, you can use the man command (which works from within the z/OS UNIX shell) to view the available commands online in man page format.

If you are not using the default data set EPH.SEPHTAB, you will have to copy the sample EPHWP00 parmlib member from SEPHSAMP into SYS1.PARMLIB. The EPHWP00 sample member contains one line of left-aligned text, "EPH" , which is the IBM-supplied prefix for the SEPHTAB data set. If you change this prefix, you must then change the "EPH" statement to match the new prefix. Make sure that the prefix is left justified on the first line of the EPHWP00 member

If you rename the SEPTHTAB data set to another suffix, the first line of /etc/booksrv/bookread.conf must contain: 
DSN=fully.qualified.dsn.where.members.are

The preferred location of the BookRead configuration file is /etc/booksrv/bookread.conf. If that location is not found, the system uses sys1.parmlib(ephwp00). In other words, if you use the default name EPH.SEPHTAB, you have nothing more to do. However, if you have a /etc/booksrv/bookread.conf file, it must contain the name of the data set. If you decide not to use the /etc/booksrv/bookread.conf file, you must set an environment variable (EPHBookReadConfig) to let the shell know where to find the BookRead configuration file.