Re: Man pages are going crazy

[Vivek Dasmohapatra <vivek@etla.org>]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Benedek Frank wrote:

> Thanks for that. That Alias thing sounds good, but unfortunately I have no
> idea where to start. Can you go into that a little further? I dont have the
> knowledge to set that up, what you just advised to me.

well, personally I'd make a small shell script:

type "locale" <- this will show you a bunch of variables.

in your shell script, unset all of these:

#!/bin/sh

unset LC_CTYPE
unset LC_COLLATE

and so forth.

then make sure LANG and LANGUAGE are set to C

export LANG=C
export LANGUAGE=C

then call the actual command:

/usr/bin/man "$@"

You probably don't need to set all of them, but ime you don't want to let
man ever get the slightest hint of any language or locale settings:
even a locale of en is likely to reult iin broken man pages as it tries to
be "clever" and use funky emdash characters.

HTH