Steve couldn't post to the list, but his message is below and my response follows. Many thanks, Steve, for your effort on my behalf! You reminded me that emacs provides a very nice way of viewing info pages. I plan to use it more often. It seems that $INFOPATH is alive and well. I just figured out how I am supposed to use it. It typically does not exist unless the user creates it because the info pages are made available from a central location (as you describe below). So I would do something like this: export INFOPATH=/home/mbmiller/local/info: Note the trailing colon. That is explained here: "If you do not define INFOPATH, Info uses a default path defined when Info was built as the initial list of directories. If the value of INFOPATH ends with a colon (or semicolon on MS-DOS/MS-Windows), the initial list of directories is constructed by appending the build-time default to the value of INFOPATH." Source: http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/info-stnd/html_node/Invoking-Info.html So I think this works for me in my ~/.bashrc whether $INFOPATH existed previously or not: if [ -d "$HOME/local/info" ]; then export INFOPATH=$HOME/local/info:$INFOPATH fi If it did not exist, then I get this: export INFOPATH=$HOME/local/info: That is, I get the desired trailing colon described above. Mike On Wed, 18 Sep 2013, Steve Trapp wrote: > File </usr/share/info/dir> seems to be the top menu of the *info* program. > > You get this by doing the following (this is in case you're not using > debian): > > 1. Launch emacs > 2. Type command into emacs: < [Control-h]i > > 3. Type command into emacs: < [Control-x][Control-f] > > Read the bottom line to get the path. When I did it, it said > </usr/share/info/>. > 4. cd /usr/share/info > 5. less dir > > I couldn't find anything about environment variable INFOPATH. I'm wondering > if it is still viable. > > I did "info info", and that led to how to use it. > > Seems that there's a project on GNU/FSF called texinfo which produces the > info files, amongst other formats. The manual for texinfo had something like > "installing an info file", but I wasn't grokking (comprehending) it, so I > gave up. :( > > You're welcome to attempt a grok of the textinfo manual. ;) > > Web address of texinfo manual (rendered into HTML, thank heavens): > <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo > /html_node/index.html#SEC_Contents> > > Hope this helps, > -Steve > > -- > Name: Steve Trapp > Homepage: http://steventrapp.home.comcast.net > Email: stevetrapp **AT** comcast **DOT** net > Locale: en_US.UTF-8 | Location: Upper Midwest >