Re: why aren't man pages compressed?
Bruce Perens (Bruce@pixar.com) wrote on 14 November 1995 16:35:
>I thought about switching on man page compression a while back, and did
>not because I wanted to allow for other manual pagers than man_db
>that might not handle it. It is probably worth doing at some point.
>I think we can compress both the source and the cat files, though
Any decent man program handles compressed pages. If you have one that
doesn't it's a very good reason to ditch it.
>compressing the cat files is only worthwhile if the uncompressor
>runs very quickly.
zcat runs fast enough from my experience.
In fact, the only argument I have in favour of uncompressed pages is
that you can run a grep in the entire directory to search for
something. For example, I found the file /etc/gateways and didn't know
what it was about. I did a grep and found it in the routed page.
BTW, why does this file exist in my installation if I haven't
installed the package? Also, I found other files that shouldn't be
there, for example smb.conf (of course I didn't install samba).
Carlos
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