Bug#2072: MANOPT not parsed well?

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@sgk.tiac.net>]

> Package: man
> Version: 2.3.10-6
>
> I can't seem to find a way to set MANOPT to change the default pager for
> displaying man pages to "less -s".
>
> I want to do this:
>
>   MANOPT='-P "less -s"'
>
> But man apparently doesn't parse the double quotes, and treats the -s as a ne
w
> man option. The man page for man hints that embedded spaces should be escaped
> with \, so I tried:
>
>   MANOPT="-P less\\ -s"
>
> With this, running man I get:
>
>   sh: less -s: command not found
>   man: command exited with status 32512: /bin/gzip -dc
>   '/var/catman/cat1/man.1.gz' | { export MAN_PN LESS; MAN_PN='man(1)';
>   LESS="$LESS\$-Pm\:\$ix8mPm Manual page $MAN_PN ?ltline %lt?L/%L.:byte
>   %bB?s/%s..?e (END):?pB %pB\\%..";  less\ -s; }
>
> Apparently man correctly includes -s as part of the option, but doesn't strip
> the \ so it gets passed down into the resulting shell command above. I've
> tried many variations on quoting and backslashing, and none seem to give the
> desired results. Any ideas, or can this be classified as a bug?
>
> --
> Robert Leslie
> rob@advantage.org
>
>

I'm having a problem which may or may not be related to this:
I've been trying to get MH to use less with the '-c' option.  That is,
I put these lines into my .mh_profile:
mproc: /usr/bin/less -c
lproc: /usr/bin/less -c

Like Robert Leslie, I've tried many variations of quotes and backslashes.
I get a similar error message:
    unable to exec /usr/bin/less -c: No such file or directory

I've also tried using an alias, e.g.,
alias les="/usr/bin/less -c"
with the lines in .mh_profile set to:
mproc: les
lproc: les

This produced the same error message.
I had presumed this was an MH problem, and should be sent to mh-users.
Now I'm not so sure.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Susan Kleinmann
sgk@sgk.tiac.net