ethernet driver update issue

[Harmanjeet pal singh]

I am using xbuntu 18.04 with kernel 4.16.8-rt2
when I am trying to update the driver and following issue appeared.

coe@FLSCCM:~/Desktop/e1000e/e1000e-3.4.2.1/src$ sudo make install
[sudo]
password for coe:

make -C /lib/modules/4.16.8-rt2/build CC=gcc SUBDIRS=/home/coe/Desktop/e1000e/e1000e-3.4.2.1/src modules

make[1]: Entering directory '/opt/kernel/linux-4.16.8'

Building modules, stage 2.
  M
ODPOST 1 modules
make[1]: Leaving directory '/opt/kernel/linux-4.16.8'

# remove all old versions of the driver

find /lib/modules/4.16.8-rt2 -name e1000e.ko -exec rm -f {} \; || true

find /lib/modules/4.16.8-rt2 -name e1000e.ko.gz -exec rm -f {} \; || true

install -D -m 644 e1000e.ko /lib/modules/4.16.8-rt2/updates/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/e1000e.ko

/sbin/depmod -a 4.16.8-rt2 || true

install -D -m 644 e1000e.7.gz /usr/share/man/man7/e1000e.7.gz

man -c -P'cat > /dev/null' e1000e || true

man: command exited with status 1: (cd /usr/share/man && /usr/lib/man-db/zsoelim) | (cd /usr/share/man && /usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//IGNORE) | (cd /usr/share/man && preconv -e UTF-8) | (cd /usr/share/man && tbl) | (cd /usr/share/man && nroff -mandoc -rLL=264n -rLT=264n -Tutf8) | gzip -c7

[opuoigsa (opuoigsa)]

I have exactly the same problem on 18.04 and kernel 4.15.0-36-generic. Reinstalling manpages and man-db did not help.
Did you find a solution?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jun Baba (baba5246)]

I also have the same error on 18.04 and kernel 4.15.0-42-generic...

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

In my opinion, this was a bug in the e1000e installation scripts. "man" intentionally doesn't support redirections inside its -P argument like this; implementing that without going via a shell (which is a practice that routinely leads to security bugs, so we avoid it) would add a reasonably significant amount of complexity, and it isn't worth it here because just redirecting the output of "man" to /dev/null would do just as well.

Furthermore, this installation script seems to have been written for a much older "man" implementation, because it appears to be deliberately trying to create a plain-text cat page, which is an obsolescent practice.

Fortunately, it seems that the maintainers of the e1000e driver noticed this, because they fixed their scripts in version 3.6.0, released on 2019-09-22. As such, I think you should just be able to update to a newer version of the driver and this should work better.