"catman: man command failed with exit status 3" when updating apropos database

[jdb2]

1) The version and edition of Linux Mint you are using (if you are not sure, open a terminal and run "mintwelcome"). :

uname -a :

Linux mint 3.13.0-37-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Mon Sep 22 21:28:38 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

lsb_release -a :

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: LinuxMint
Description: Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca
Release: 17.1
Codename: rebecca

2) What you did for the problem to happen, and how to reproduce it.

Open a terminal and type "sudo catman" It's reproducible as it fails with the same error everytime

3) What happened.

man: command exited with status 127: /usr/bin/zsoelim | /usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t ANSI_X3.4-1968//IGNORE | tbl | nroff -mandoc -Tascii | iconv -c -f ANSI_X3.4-1968 -t UTF-8//TRANSLIT | gzip -c7
catman: man command failed with exit status 3

4) What you expected to happen instead.

catman should have rebuilt the database related to apropos and whatis without failure

5) If the problem happened once, sometimes, or always.

Always.

[jdb2 (jonathanbusby)]

The corresponding version of Ubuntu also has this same bug.

Here's the launchpad link :

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/man-db/+bug/1389682