Date:	Tue, 6 Jan 1998 10:47:01 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	Victor <fesenko AT pacific DOT net DOT sg>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Info problem
In-Reply-To:	<34b28d0e.1283774@news>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.980106104622.2159O-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, Victor wrote:

> I was trying to read "allegro.inf" (the file which comes with allegro
> 3.0) and info.exe gives me a totally unexpected message - "Bad command
> or file name" and after that if I wait for 30 seconds then I get the
> file "dir.inf" displayed and the message says "There is no menu item
> "allegro.inf" in this node". The file allegro.inf is in the /INFO
> directory and there are no problems with other .inf files in that
> directory.

Info is telling you exactly what's wrong, but you are not listening.
It doesn't say that allegro.inf file is missing, it says the there is
no menu item allegro.inf in the file info/dir.  You should edit the
filr info/dir and add a menu item (below the "* Menu:" line) that says
something like this:

* Allegro:  (allegro.inf).
	The Allegro Gaming library.

Then you should invoke Info like this:

	 info allegro

If your Info reader is installed correctly, this should now work.  (I
would expect the Allegro installation instructions to tell you that
you need to edit info/dir; if they don't, I suggest to report this to
Shawn.)

The reason for "Bad command or file name" is that when Info doesn't
find the topic you are asking for in the info/dir main menu, it tries
to call the `man' program on the assumption that a man page for that
topic is installed somewhere.  But you don't have a `man' program
installed, thus COMMAND.COM prints that ubiquitous message.  The
15-second delay is because Info invokes `man' through a pipe, and on
Unix it can take some time until the data comes out of the pipe (since
programs run asynchronously), so Info waits for a while before giving
up.

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