man: command not found in zsh (Mac OS 10.58)

Question

I changed to zsh from the default (by changing the "Shells open with" preference in Terminal to "command (complete path)" set to /bin/zsh

While most things seem to work, I tried to see the man page for a command and got a "permission denied" message. When I tried sudo, I got "man: command not found".

I changed to the default shell (/bin/tcsh), and this is what I get when I open a new shell:

Last login: Fri Nov 18 13:53:50 on ttys000
Fri Nov 18 13:55:21 CST 2011
/usr/bin/manpath: Permission denied.

If I try man, I get the same "command not found message". I guess there is something wrong in my PATH, but I have no idea how to fix it. "echo $PATH" (in tcsh) gets:

/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/texbin

In zsh, it gets:

/usr/bin:/bin:/sw/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/texbin:/usr/X11/bin

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There's something wrong in your PATH all right, but not in the value of the PATH variable. Rather, you've screwed up the permissions of /usr/bin or the files within it. Run

ls -ld / /usr /usr/bin /usr/bin/manpath

You should see rwxr-xr-x permissions for all four. If you don't, fix the permissions. This command should restore permissions to sane values:

chmod 755 / /usr /usr/bin /usr/bin/*

It's possible that there are other files on your system that have broken permissions; look around and see.