Re: Exiting man pages display

["Thomas E. Dodd /CSDC" <ted cypress com>]

Kevin Colby wrote:
> 
> Thomas E. Dodd /CSDC wrote:
> > Kevin Colby wrote:
> > >
> > > 'man' is actually 'less', which is actually modeled on 'more'.
> >
> > man is a program. A close approximation would be:
> >
> > search $MANPATH for the command and set $MANFILE
> > nroff -man $MANFILE |$PAGER
> 
> Hm.  I stand corrected, apparently.
> 
> I was under the impression that the Linux implementation of man
> was really using nroff and less behind the scenes.  I suppose
> not everyone would install nroff though, so that wouldn't work
> very well.

I haven't looked at the sources recently, so it
could have a built-in nroff or a similar formatter.
But you can definitly change the pager.

the nroff-man xx|less still works :)

my point was that it's much more than just less.
so you can't do 'less /usr/man/man1/man.1'
and see a nice, formatted man page :)


Looking at the sources for man-1.4h (RedHat 4.1 distro)
and the lorax binary (man-1.5g-5 ) with strace,
Man finds the file and fork()s to the "roff" executable.
that could be troff, nroff, groff, or what ever you
specify (see man's man page) and /etc/man.conf
says that RedHat 6.0.55 is using groff for troff and nroff.

	-Thomas