Error when copying .../share/man

[floer32]

Using Manjaro Linux 0.83 (XFCE Edition). Installed node 0.8.20 manually then used npm to install n. Have since used n to install several versions of node. Everything seems to be working, including switching node versions (as long as I do sudo but I figure that's given). I do get this error however:

cp: cannot overwrite non-directory ‘/usr/local/share/man’ with directory ‘/usr/local/n/versions/0.9.9/share/man’

Indeed, this is because /usr/local/share/man is a symbolic link to /usr/local/man. Not sure if this is applicable to Arch in general or just Manjaro.

Again, things still seem to be working; all that seems to be faltering is the copying of the man page, and that's fine really. Nonetheless thought it might be worth reporting.

[jasonmorganson]

I'm on Gentoo and had this same issue. By default /usr/lib is a symlink to /usr/lib64.

Found this discussion on Stack Exchange:
http://superuser.com/questions/534790/cp-into-destination-hierarchy-with-symbolic-link

Looks like on line 245, the cp command isn't capable of supporting symlinks:
cp -fr $dir/* $N_PREFIX

By my eyes using rsync is the cleaner than using find. Though I'm not sure which is more commonly included. As far as I know both of these are included on most systems. Does anyone know if that's true?

I have been testing using rsync and it seems to work well for me. I'll submit a pull request with the change.

[qw3rtman]

@ntrrgc, what OS are you running?

[ntrrgc]

Arch Linux.

[deepsweet]

same error here with Arch Linux.

[coproduto]

Same error happening on Antergos Linux. I'm copying manpages manually from /usr/local/n/versions/node/{version}/share/man to /usr/share/man as a workaround.

[shadowspawn]

A manual work-around might be to install to a different location using N_PREFIX, and add to PATH or add symbolic links in /usr/local. Likewise, there is third party installer n-install.

(A little history. The suggestion to fix this issue by using rsync instead of cp got rejected in #104. Support got added later to cope with symbolic links as direct subdirectories of /usr/local such as /usr/local/bin in #227, but not deeper in the hierarchy such as /usr/local/share/man.)

[devzsolt]

Thank you @JohnRGee the recommended n-install solution works like a charm on the latest Manjaro, so possibly on other Arch-based distros too. I also tried installing n from an AUR package called nodejs-n but despite it was prepared for Arch systems it had this same issue with the symlink dir. So n-install is the way to go for now.

[shadowspawn]

If readers want to install to /usr/local and a fork of n is an option, I have switched to rsync in nvh which avoids this symlink problem.

[floer32]

Sorry if other users disagree but since I opened this in 2013 and have not touched arch linux since that year or year after, I'm closing this issue. Arch Linux was a great way to force myself to "live" in the CLI (and I still do today) but even if I went back, I would not expect nonessential conveniences like n to work there. If someone else feels differently they can open another ticket and link this one or something, just casting my "vote" to close it... since I was the OP.