Looks like I fixed the problem on my own with help from SpaghettiCat in the #cygwin channel on freenode. Things I checked before figuring out the problem:
- I checked the value of $PAGER and $MANPAGER (they were blank)
- I tried setting the value of both to "less" (no joy)
- I tried feeding a known man page to man, via
man /usr/share/man/man8/fdisk.8.gz
(still no joy) - I swapped out a copy of
/etc/man.conf
with one from a known-working cygwin install. (no dice)
At this point, it was clear that more was messed up than just man. I figured I would have to trash my install. However, I discovered the cygcheck -c
command, which I ran. The result: half of my packages were "Incomplete", including groff. Thanks, Microsoft System Restore!
After running cygwin's setup_x86.exe, and reinstalling the borked packages, everything's fine.