A Strange Error
For those of you who program in Mac OS X, once you upgrade to Leopard, you may have to resolve problems with duplicate man pages. I came across this issue when I noticed that hitting ls -l in Terminal started giving me this unfamiliar “@” symbol after the permissions column of some of the files (I had seen “+” there before, but not “@“)
Unfortunately, the man pages didn’t help, and it took me a little time to figure out that for some reason, the old man pages from Tiger were still around, and the system preferentially reads from those rather than the new Leopard ones. A simple Ruby script found here does the trick in removing the old man pages. This problem only appears to those who did an “Upgrade” installation of Leopard instead of a clean install or an “Archive and Install.”
The new Leopard man pages, of course, explain the “@” symbol. (It denotes that the file has extended attributes from the new metadata system. To see the attributes on a specific file, try typing xattr -l filename.)
