Running GNU coreutils via Homebrew on your Mac? Here's a one-liner to get the manpages working!

osx-brew-gnu-coreutils-man.sh

# Short of learning how to actually configure OSX, here's a hacky way to use
# GNU manpages for programs that are GNU ones, and fallback to OSX manpages otherwise
alias man='_() { echo $1; man -M $(brew --prefix)/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman $1 1>/dev/null 2>&1;  if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]; then man -M $(brew --prefix)/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman $1; else man $1; fi }; _'

Follow an article like this describing how to use Homebrew to setup GNU coreutils et al on your Mac.

Then when you want to spend less than a minute getting the manpages to work with both your new GNU programs and your Mac programs you still want to be able to use (like mdfind), paste this gist in your ~/.profile and away you go!

Thanks for this solution!

Additionally, if one wants to make it available system-wide, one could add the lines to
/etc/paths
/etc/manpaths
Where /usr/libexec/path_helper would include them.

    $> PA1="$(brew --prefix coreutil)/libexec/" ;
    $> : ; # expand slashes (for sed use)
    $> BINPA ="${PA1//\//\\/}gnubin" ;
    $> MANPA ="${PA1//\//\\/}gnuman" ;
    $> : ; # put as first line
    $> sudo sed -i'' -e '1s/^/'"${BINPA}"'\n/' /etc/paths ;
    $> sudo sed -i'' -e '1s/^/'"${MANPA}"'\n/' /etc/manpaths ;

This solution makes the [section] argument for man fail to work.
e.g:
man 2 read can not find the man page for read in section 2.

Not one to settle for hacky work-arounds, I did a bit of googling and eventually found this solution to work for adding the gnu manpages:

1. Open the file /etc/man.conf
2. Add a line:

MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman

Hope that helps!

Strange bug for me. Once i use man ... sudo is aliased to that function.

@JacobDorman Do you use oh-my-zsh or prezto? There is an alias for sudo(!) which causes this failure. So try to comment out the line alias _='sudo' or add a line with unalias _ before the man alias.

The alias is not working with bash.

@tasmo Ahh so there is. I never use that. unalias _ fixes the issue.

What's wrong with just putting /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman at the front of $MANPATH?

I have the same question as @OJFord. Why not just export MANPATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman:$MANPATH"?

man section will not work, use $@ instead of $1

alias man='_() { echo $@; man -M $(brew --prefix)/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman $@ 1>/dev/null 2>&1;  if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]; then man -M $(brew --prefix)/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnuman $@; else man $@; fi }; _'

This man hack command now not working in macOS 12.3.1 .. when i put this in my alias file and try to type man it stuck on "ma" only.. shall we have new workaround