Problem with zcat uncompressing man pages

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 12:58:01 +0100, Jamie Paul Griffin wrote:
> Hi
> 
> When I read 'certain' -- not all -- man pages zcat writes a small error to stderr when opening the man page; however, the man page does actually open. The message i get on the terminal is: 
> 
> 	zcat: error writing to output: Broken pipe
> 	zcat: /usr/local/man/man5/muttrc.5.gz: uncompress failed
> 
> When closing the man page, another message is shown on stderr:
> 
> 	grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):54131:fatal error: output error
> 
> 
> Would anyone here know the possible cause and fix for this issue?

Well, what is /usr/local/man/man5/muttrc.5.gz?

ls -l /usr/local/man/man5/muttrc.5.gz
file /usr/local/man/man5/muttrc.5.gz
zcat /usr/local/man/man5/muttrc.5.gz | head -5
xxd /usr/local/man/man5/muttrc.5.gz | head

It looks like you simple have a garbled manpage, and the catpage is
displayed instead.

Cheers
Uli