Re: did i install correctly?

[Karl Berry]

    but, i now change my question; if my dir entry gets knackered again, is
    there any way i can regenerate it to include all the program entries
    (such as 'ls') without having to reinstall the package in question?

There are two scripts in the util directory of the Texinfo source
distbiution, fix-info-dir and gen-dir-node, which do something along
these lines.  I've never personally tried either one, I just include
them in the distribution as they were contributed.

Hope this helps,
karl