Re: Exiting man pages display

[Denice <deatrich lcavsun1 epfl ch>]

On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Thomas E. Dodd /CSDC wrote:

> 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.

In fact, on unix 'man' always invokes a pager.  If you want to use 'less'
(the default on redhat) as your pager on other UNIX systems, just export
the PAGER variable and you are set:

export PAGER=less    (Bourne shells)
or
setenv PAGER less    (C-shells)

I love the expression hilighting of 'less' when you do searches inside
man-pages, so I prefer 'less' on all UNIX systems.  Anyone who has ever
used it is won over immediately..


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