[techtalk] man, more or less? :)

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2000 at 07:49:43AM -0500 or thereabouts, Emily Cartier wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Jan 2000 18:52:29 +1100
> "Jenn V." <jenn at simegen.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Actually, you didn't waste your time - I didn't realise 'man' was paged
> > with 'more' typically - if I know I'm planning to search a man page I pipe
> > it through less. I can save myself a step now. :)
> 
> That's odd. When I use man, it usually acts as if it's piped through
> less to begin with. More doesn't need a 'q' to end, but less does.
> 
> Emily (maybe I'm misinterpreting here)

Nope, I wondered the exact same thing. man on my RH 6.1 system pipes
through less. Or acts as if it does. In the man page for man, in 
fact, it tells you that if you get annoying blinking <AL> characters
instead of hyphens, the fix is to adjust your LESSCHARSET (to latin1,
my case). 

When I am looking at new stuff I've downloaded and wondering whether
to install it or not and it comes with a man page, I read the page with
	groff -man -T ascii filename | more
I had assumed that man did something similar, only with 'less' and
via code rather than a shellscript (certainly /usr/bin/man is a binary
here). I'm also told that the "-man" bit is nothing to do with
manual pages but a m option that refers to a file called "an" and
is a bad pun :)

I'm curious. How does man work? 

Telsa, asking the weird questions today.

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