`cargo help <command>` doesn't work on Windows

[inliquid]

cargo help doesn't work on clean Windows installation.

Steps
Just run any help command, such as cargo help init:

C:\Users\***>cargo help build
No manual entry for C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Temp\cargo-man07xxpc

Notes

Output of cargo version:

cargo 1.50.0 (f04e7fab7 2021-02-04)

[ehuss]

Thanks for the report! The built-in help uses the man command to display the help page if man can be found in PATH. This seems to be finding a man executable that maybe doesn't support Windows file paths.

It looks like you might be using cmd. Can you check your PATH environment variable and find where the man executable is coming from? I suspect it is something like msys2 or cygwin. When running those commands outside of the cygwin path translation environment, passing Windows-style paths doesn't work.

[inliquid]

Apparently man is coming from c:\cygwin64\bin which is cygwin installation as you suggested, and cargo was run from plain cmd. However it looks like error is the same when command is run from cygwin terminal:

<username>@<hostname> ~
$ cargo help build
No manual entry for C:\cygwin64\tmp\cargo-maneMpHvV

[ehuss]

Yea, Cargo is not aware of cygwin-style paths. I thought I had tested this, but I can confirm it doesn't work. I think the code should just be changed to not try to run man on windows at all.

[inliquid]

Does it mean that cargo help <command> won't work at all on Windows? That would be unfortunate. Other tools workaround this, for instance:

• git help <...> opens a web browser with (locally stored) *.html man page
• go help <...> doesn't rely on man, instead it just outputs text to stdout. So I can read it as go help <...> | less on any platform. Even on Windows without cygwin I can still run go help <...> | more or can just scroll it in terminal.

[ehuss]

It works, it just isn't formatted with underlines/bold/word-wrapping, etc.

[inliquid]

Ah, ok then.

[ehuss]

I'm going to close this as fixed by #9378. I somehow didn't recognize that this was essentially the same as #9197. I'd appreciate it if you could try with the most recent nightly and let me know if it still doesn't work.