Gfilui

When I try to get the manpages with man it seems to display nothing and behaves as though I just pressed enter

~$ man ls
~$ man man

I have tried solutions from these pages to no avail
question1 question2. This last question matches my condition exactly but the fixes doesn't seem to work. Although info seems to work.

Here are some additional information:

~$ man --version
man 2.7.6.1

~$ type -p man
/usr/bin/man

~$ type -t man
file

~$ manpath
/home/abhilash/anaconda3/man:/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/man

~$ uname -a
Linux abhilash-ThinkPad-T440 4.13.0-38-generic #43-Ubuntu SMP Wed Mar 14 15:20:44 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

UPDATE

~$ type -a man
man is /usr/bin/man

~$ env | grep 'PAGER|^MAN'
~$ 

UPDATE 2

~$ ls -1 /usr/share/man/man1 | wc -l
2145

~$ ls -l "$(type -p pager)"
lrwxrwxrwx 1 abhilash abhilash 18 Apr 16 18:43 /home/abhilash/anaconda3/bin/pager -> ../lib/R/bin/pager

~$ ls -l "$(readlink "$(type -p pager)")"
ls: cannot access '../lib/R/bin/pager': No such file or directory

Turns out, after the anaconda installation or some package installation through conda, the default pager is re-written. The exact cause of this is unknown.
Just some more information

~$ anaconda --version
anaconda Command line client (version 1.6.9)
~$ conda --version 
conda 4.4.10
~$ history | grep conda
 108 bash Anaconda3-5.1.0-Linux-x86_64.sh 
 110 anaconda-navigator
 181 anaconda-navigator
 187 anaconda-navigator
 311 conda info --envs
 312 conda install rpy2
 313 conda search PySide
 314 conda search Python
 366 conda install findspark
 367 conda info --envs
 370 conda install findspark
 373 conda search findspark
 374 conda install -c conda-forge findspark 
 495 anaconda --version
 496 conda --version 
 497 conda list
 499 history | grep conda

My strongest guess is that rpy2 installation had this effect of changing the pager information given the time of events.

But these are the steps I took to solve the issue.

~$ update-alternatives --display pager
pager - auto mode
 link best version is /bin/less
 link currently points to /bin/less
 link pager is /usr/bin/pager
 slave pager.1.gz is /usr/share/man/man1/pager.1.gz
/bin/less - priority 77
 slave pager.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/less.1.gz
/bin/more - priority 50
 slave pager.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/more.1.gz

~$ rm /home/abhilash/anaconda3/bin/pager

Ensure that the pager defaults to the one that came with man-db by typing the following to confirm

~$ ls -l "$(type -p pager)"
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Apr 9 13:57 /usr/bin/pager -> /etc/alternatives/pager

This solution was arrived at after going through this link in an attempt to set the pager to default.

Thanks to glenn and terdon for their inputs in solving this issue.