Re: Debian 1.1 man & more
In article <[🔎] Pine.LNX.3.93.960602090541.210A-100000@SAL9000> you write:
>
>On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Guy Maor wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Richard Lovison wrote:
>>
>> > While using man to read a manpage I am not able to scroll backwards a page
>> > by using "b" or "^B".
>>
>> 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.)
>
>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. :)
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.
>> less doesn't have this deficiency. Use it with man by setting the
>> 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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