Instead of silently doing nothing at all,

warn and return non-zero when the manpath is empty, that is,
when /etc/man.conf is non-existent or unreadable
AND the environment variable MANPATH is unset or empty
AND no directories were given on the command line.

Inspired by the error handling in espie@'s makewhatis(8),
except that one doesn't know about MANPATH.

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mandocdb.c b/mandocdb.c
index 46b6c3b0..e4ece756 100644
--- a/mandocdb.c
+++ b/mandocdb.c
@@ -462,6 +462,11 @@ main(int argc, char *argv[])
 		} else
 			manpath_parse(&dirs, path_arg, NULL, NULL);
 
+		if (0 == dirs.sz) {
+			exitcode = (int)MANDOCLEVEL_BADARG;
+			say("", "Empty manpath");
+		}
+
 		/*
 		 * First scan the tree rooted at a base directory, then
 		 * build a new database and finally move it into place.