[techtalk] man, more or less? :)

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2000 at 07:28:11PM +0000 or thereabouts, Karl-Heinz Zimmer wrote:
> 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 tend not to use aliases, or I get too used to them and use
them on other systems and unexpected things happen :) So 
it wasn't defined there, no; and I'd checked out /etc/bashrc
and /etc/profile et cetera pretty heavily a while ago whilst
trying to locate this LESSCHARSET thing, and discovering it
wasn't in those, either...
 
> 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, b and c snipped]

I didn't know about the options $MANOPT, $PAGER, and the
rest. But I re-read man man (ahem) and spotted references
to /etc/man.config. Duh. I should have done that in the
first place :) 

It sets all those and some more, and is heavily commented,
and includes
	PAGER		/usr/bin/less -is
And apparently -i is --ignore-case; and -s is --squeeze-blank-lines
(there's some really inventive long-options in here), which I 
didn't know before. (I don't tend to use less.)

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

I don't seem to have that one.
 
> (In my humble opinion all these aliases are not a very good idea...)

Heh. As I said, I don't tend to use them; and now I'm glad!
 
> I hope this helps and wish you a nice day,

Thanks. It did.

Telsa

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