[techtalk] man, more or less? :)

[Karl-Heinz Zimmer]

Am 1/11/00, 4:22:42 PM, schrieb Telsa Gwynne:

> man on my RH 6.1 system pipes through less.
> Or acts as if it does.

Just an idea: might it perhaps be that in your  ~/.bashrc
there are half a dozen so called 'aliases' defined?
Please type the command  alias  to see if some are working.

> I'm curious. How does man work?

> Telsa, asking the weird questions today.

Not at all 'weird'.   :-)

There are quite _some_ ways to modify the behavior of
'man' without the user noticing that such a modification
has been made. I remember the following ones:

a) Export the  $MANOPT  in  ~/.bashrc  or on a similiar place.
   There you may define the same parameters that are allowed
   on the command-line, e.g. a nice little  -P ...  would
   tell  man  to use another pager program.
   By default it uses  /usr/bin/pager  which is normaly a symb.
   link to the program  /usr/bin/less 

b) Export the  $PAGER  in  ~/.bashrc  or on a similiar place.
   This variable is been taken into account by  man  when there
   is NO  -P  parameter on the calling command-line.

c) Be brutal and change the link  /usr/bin/pager  to let it point
   to another file.

d) Some people define an alias in their  ~/.bashrc  like this:

        alias man='man -P /bin/more'

(In my humble opinion all these aliases are not a very good idea...)

I hope this helps and wish you a nice day,

Karl-Heinz
-- 
K.-H. Zimmer     *     Hamburg     *     Germany




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