man tar works and in the SEE ALSO section it references tar(5) but man 5 tar outputs No entry for tar in section 5 of the manual.
My primary goal is to get those for my OS X laptop. But I've seen them missing on Debian servers as well. brew search man doesn't offer me additional man pages to install. Any hints how to install the section 5 manpages? (tar is just an example, I'd need them in general)
on OSX the man pages are stored on /usr/share/man/man5/. Some of them are already installed (e.g. for fstab). But for e.g. tar it isn't.
Unfortunately there's no libarchive-dev package on homebrew. A workaround for just the man pages is to download the libarchive sourcecode for the version which is installed (tar --version) and copy the man pages over:
sudo cp doc/man/*.5 /usr/share/man/man5/
Man section 5 is "File Formats and Conventions" and is not installed by default. see What do the numbers in a man page mean?
To install part of it on a Debian system, install:
sudo apt-get install libarchive-dev
From packages.debian.org:
Package: libarchive-dev (3.1.2-11+deb8u1)
The libarchive library provides a flexible interface for reading and writing archives in various formats such as tar and cpio. libarchive also supports reading and writing archives compressed using various compression filters such as gzip and bzip2. The library is inherently stream-oriented; readers serially iterate through the archive, writers serially add things to the archive.
Double checking if man(5) tar page is installed:
dpkg -S /usr/share/man/man5/tar.5.gz
libarchive-dev:amd64: /usr/share/man/man5/tar.5.gz
Listing the files installed/owned by the package:
dpkg -L libarchive-dev | grep man
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man5
/usr/share/man/man5/tar.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man5/mtree.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man5/libarchive-formats.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man5/cpio.5.gz
/usr/share/man/man3
/usr/share/man/man3/libarchive_internals.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/libarchive_changes.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/libarchive.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_set_options.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_open.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_new.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_header.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_free.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_format.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_finish_entry.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_filter.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_disk.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_data.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write_blocksize.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_write.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_util.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_set_options.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_open.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_new.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_header.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_free.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_format.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_filter.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_extract.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_disk.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read_data.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_read.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry_time.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry_stat.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry_perms.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry_paths.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry_linkify.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry_acl.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/archive_entry.3.gz
In OS/X you have already parts of the man 5 at /usr/share/man/man5 directory. Apart from copying there the aforementioned pages, have not investigated how to install them.
On a Fedora 22 system:
# rpm -qf /usr/share/man/man5/tar.5.gz
libarchive-3.1.2-14.fc22.x86_64
So try updating libarchive.
tar --versionand download the source for that version of libarchive. – fd0 Jul 04 '16 at 15:24