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Re: Searching manpages for option codes, e.g. "--all"


On 11/29/2011 3:56 PM, Tim McDaniel wrote:
On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, carolus wrote:
After opening "man ls", trying to search for "--all" leads to
"Pattern not found (press RETURN)".

My experiment agrees with that. Do you know why that happens -- what is it doing so "/--all" doesn't work?


No idea. Apparently "man" invokes $PAGER, and in linux, "less" works as desired and "more" does not. If you look at the .1 file, the option codes are scrambled with a lot of formatting codes that must be stripped out or ignored for search to work.



Whether in an older default terminal or the new one, I've never had a
problem with
PAGER=/usr/bin/less
export PAGER

You can set it, but that doesn't help.


Further, on my system with little customization, the default man pager
is less anyway, so (for example)
man ls
invokes less anyway.

Which explains why setting PAGER doesn't help in Cygwin.



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