Subject: Debian 1.1 man & more

From: Richard Lovison <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 21:23:16 -0400 (EDT)

While using man to read a manpage I am not able to scroll backwards a page
by using "b" or "^B".  Has anyone else experienced this?  My current
version of man is 2.3.10-11.  If I just use "more" to read a text file,
everything works fine.

Richard

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From: Guy Maor <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 22:18:35 -0500 (CDT)

> version of man is 2.3.10-11.  If I just use "more" to read a text file,

more can't go backwards on unseekable files, like pipes for example.
(man pipes the data out to the viewer so it'll start up faster.)

less doesn't have this deficiency.  Use it with man by setting the
PAGER environment variable to `less'.

Guy

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From: Richard Lovison <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 09:15:44 -0400 (EDT)

On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Guy Maor wrote:

> > by using "b" or "^B". 
 
Hmmm.  If my memory serves me right I was able to do this on my old
Slackware setup and I am currently able to do this on my provider's system
which is running System V Release 4.0.  BTW, this is not a complaint,
just a statement indicating my confusion and ignorance. :) 

> PAGER environment variable to `less'.

I'll do this.  Thanks for the help. ----Richard

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From: Dale Scheetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 15:05:15 -0400 (EDT)

> version of man is 2.3.10-11.  If I just use "more" to read a text file,
If I remember correctly, this is a deficiency of more wrt pipes. You can
correct this in several ways. The simplest is to set PAGER equal to less.
Less does not have this problem and is, over all, a better pager than
more. Try it, you'll like it!

Luck,

Dwarf

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From: [email-masked] (Austin Donnelly)
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 96 20:58 BST

>just a statement indicating my confusion and ignorance. :) 

Those systems maybe format the manpage to a temporary file, then
use more to view that file.  Debian's man put the formatted output
through a pipe directly to the pager, for speed.

>> PAGER environment variable to `less'.

Note that you can also do: 

  $ export MANOPT='-Pless'

so that you only get less when viewing manpages, not as your default
pager (if for some reason you don't like less :)

Austin

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From: Guy Maor <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 02:36:11 -0500 (CDT)

On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, N. Salwen wrote:

> I tried this both man and more on my slackware system at home and they
> both go backwards.  I don't have the PAGER variable set.
> 
> I realize this is slackware but I am surprised at the difference.

As someone else pointed out, slackware man most likely writes out a
temp file for more.  You can check /proc/xx/cmdline where xx is more's
pid on your slackware system.

Starting the pager at the end of a pipe is a feature; it starts up more
quickly.

Guy

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From: "N. Salwen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 03:26:54 EDT

Guy Maor wrote

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From: Richard Lovison <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 08:38:17 -0400 (EDT)

> pager (if for some reason you don't like less :)

Thanks for the education---`less' works great as the default pager.  Uh
oh, I feel a suggestion to a developer coming on.:)  Is it possible to
have `less' or `most' designed into man as the default pager so the
environment variable doesn't have to be set?  Is there an advantage to
using `more' that I'm not aware of? ----Richard

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From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 96 03:32 BST

How about having each pager program use update-alternatives to provide
a possible variant of /usr/bin/pager, and then having man configured
by default to use /usr/bin/pager ?

This would mean that man couldn't tell that less was being used and
give it all those funky arguments with the name of the manpage, &c,
but it would work better than the current scheme.

Ian.