Re: man files to text editor
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 02:09:27AM +0100, Jan Minar wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 12:41:41AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 10:14:54PM +0100, Jan Minar wrote:
> > > This actually should not work, you have to tell man(1) it should
> > > send the formatted manpage to stdout, instead of messing with the
> > > pager.
> >
> > This is incorrect; it is intended to work as Lou described, and it
> > does work. man(1) checks whether its standard output is a terminal
> > before
>
> Shame on me... I *did* try it, but, by mistake, not on the quick
> machine, but on the slow one--so after I waited for too long, I
> decided it doesn't work (still I think it didn't work this way
> always).
Actually I think I made a late-night error, sorry: it appears to be the
pager that does the terminal check, not man, so it will depend somewhat
on your pager. It does work at least back to potato, though.
(And it's definitely intended to work this way, so I think I'll change
man to make absolutely sure by doing the check itself as well.)
> > Narrowing the page does work even if man's output is a terminal.
>
> You're talking unstable, ain't you ;-) At least in man-db
> 2.3.20-18.woody.4, it doesn't.
I'm not talking unstable, no; it works on my stable box.
As I say I think you must have saved cat pages. man-db < 2.4.1 looked at
the width and tried to decide if it was "close enough" to just use a
saved cat page, where "close enough" meant between 66 and 80. I decided
this check was bogus and removed it in man-db 2.4.1.
This doesn't mean that $MANWIDTH was completely non-functional in
stable, though.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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